Tove Jansson

 https://tovejansson.com/

In the Midst of Death If the universe can’t outlive or transcend individual consciousness, does death even really exist? By John Crowley

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/medicine/midst-death




Once last fall, world stock markets lost a trillion dollars in value in a single day, or maybe it was a week, and I found the evident impossibility of this somehow at once appalling and exhilarating. I wondered why—why it was exhilarating, that is. Was it the suggestion, the proof even, that this supposed value had not been actual at all, had been nothing, a projection, a magic trick? Why would that be exhilarating? Some of my own money was vanishing (as my wife reminded me, asking why I was laughing), and to most humans, the sense of a vast and necessary structure dissolving into thin air like Prospero’s cloud-capp’d towers might be gloom-inducing in the extreme.

Along about the same time, the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland was being set up for its first test run, and there was speculation that the machine could so focus the random possibilities of particle collision as to swallow up the planet and all of us with it. A mini black hole might be created, doomsayers warned, a spot of “true vacuum” that could actually draw in the entire universe at the speed of light—all matter and energy and all time and space—and leave nothing at all behind. Nothing at all.

This possibility, like the vanishing trillions of cash value, was exhilarating too, only awe-inspiring rather than appalling—godlike laughter as against demonic glee.

Not long before these two possibilities stepped forward (the trillions are still gone, for now, but the wrapping-up of space and time appears unlikely, for now), I found I could think a thought that seems of a piece with these. Like them it relates to the sort of universe we live in, the idea that we can actually know what sort that is, and the consequences of such knowledge, for one self (mine) and for others whom I have read and thought about.

My thought or insight was that there is no death. It wasn’t any kind of conviction about life after death, i.e., continuing on in the spirit realm, or passing into another form, or persisting as consciousness after the death of the body, none of which (at least when stated thus baldly) has ever had much resonance for me. It was something like the opposite: that the universe can’t outlive or transcend consciousness.

The first inklings of my notion had actually arisen some years before, when a friend was dying of aggressive prostate cancer at less than sixty years of age (“The early birds are checking in,” he said of our generation). He was an inordinately cheerful man with a huge appetite for existence, several kids by three wives, and a relisher of his own past experiences and delights, of which it seemed he had forgotten none. He was hardly in denial about dying, enjoying what was left to him to enjoy, but he was fretful too—he didn’t know how he was supposed to manage this looming end. I sent him a quotation from Montaigne I like: “If you know not how to die, never trouble yourself; nature will fully instruct you upon the spot; she will exactly do that business for you; take you no care.” He enjoyed this and found so much comfort in reading it over that his wife said his printout of it would become illegible, wrinkled and stained with hospital orange juice and sweat, and have to be replaced now and then. After his death, his wife wrote to me about how sad it seemed that he died relatively young, with so much more to see and do and feel. And though of course I had to concede that it was impossible not to think in that way, I described to her this inchoate idea I had that somehow any amount of consciousness is everything, is all, is the whole of existence. One moment of looking through the window at the world is the world. It is as much of the world as any life, no matter how long, will ever have. A short life is as full as a long one.



Iwas then in the middle of writing a four-volume novel much concerned with the nature of time and the malleability of history—as it can be malleable in fiction. A leading character in the novel is the actual historical personage Giordano Bruno, a heretic philosopher of the Renaissance who was obsessed with the workings of memory in the capture of time. Bruno practiced a mnemonic system in which symbols and images of things and ideas to be remembered are distributed across a series of linked places, and then retrieved by moving in imagination from place to place—a practice with a long history, which Bruno expanded into an impossible and universe-containing spatialization of time, the past, present and future embodied in a rotating pageant of mythological and imagined beings all available at once to the mind. I don’t know if Bruno could actually employ his fantastic systems in any practical way, but of course in my fictions he could and does.

Bruno was one of the earliest Western philosophers to posit that the physical world is infinite. He believed that the stars were suns, like our sun, and that around them other planets circled. (He also thought that the planets were great conscious beings, who went in circles around their suns because they chose to.) He understood that his conception of an infinite universe implied the absence of a center: the universe was a sphere whose center was everywhere and circumference nowhere, a Scholastic theological paradox that Bruno took as physical fact. He thought he stood at the center of an infinite universe extending eternally outward, but he thought every other mind was also at that center. He held an atomic theory of matter in which every one of the infinite number of atoms that compose the infinite universe has an infinity at its center, an illimitable power Bruno called “soul,” a quality from which we derive our own aliveness (since we’re made of atoms) and which he took to pervade the universe just because the atoms fill it up, even where we perceive emptiness or vacuum, touching each other at their spherical perimeters.

Bruno wasn’t a scientist; his mathematics were primitive and his physics speculative. But his thought went further than any of the time’s protoscientists: Copernicus, Galileo, who are now denominated the forebears of our science. It wasn’t only that he conceived of an infinite populated universe; he also described an infinity of stuff within it, and within the human person responding to it. In The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast (1584) he writes that “[The gods] take delight in the multiform representation of all things, in the multiform fruit of all minds, because they are pleased with all things that exist and with all representations that are made; they are no less concerned that these should exist, and give orders and permission that they be made.” In Bruno’s memory systems, the gods stood for the creative impulses of the universe, at once disciplined and endlessly fructifying. It’s central to his thought that the mind is as capable of an understanding powered by the gods as the universe is capable of coming into infinite being through their labors. The “soul” or power or illimitable energy at the heart of each atom shines through like a lamp, and the shadows of the world cast in our souls by that light are the world in all its infinity. (I can’t say I understand this entirely, or how the atoms that make up our own souls might also illuminate us; it may well be that Bruno himself hadn’t worked it out.)

In one of the more gnomic descriptions of modern cosmology, our universe (which is now considered to be only one universe among a possibly infinite number of others) is not made of the hard, infrangible matter we think of it being, but is more like a holographic projection from a flat plane. Again I don’t really understand this, though I trust them when they say the thesis is the consequence of ineluctable mathematics. But a universe that is in fact a bright projection of an underlying order, able (at least theoretically) to vanish entirely away in a moment—small enough to fit in your pocket and at the same time infinite in all directions—sounds to me like what Bruno meant.








In 1600 Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in the Campo de’ Fiori in Rome. It’s said that he spoke up to the ecclesiastical court that condemned him, saying that they were surely more afraid to pass this sentence than he was to receive it. By all reports—though there aren’t many—he faced his horrific death with equanimity; he refused the crucifix held up to him, which the authorities thought might give him consolation, a chance to repent and win eternal life. I have often wondered about that equanimity. Was he (as some said at the time) a madman, who believed that angels—or demons—would arrive just in time to snatch him from the flames? Was he just unaware of what was to happen? Was he toughing it out, like some cocky thug in a 1930s prison movie going to the chair? Or like a slave laborer in the Gulag, had he learned over seven years’ imprisonment how to do the work, suffer the deprivation of each eternal day, not looking forward or back? I don’t pretend to really know, but I wonder if Bruno had perceived in his own way that he didn’t need to win eternal life because he was sure he already had it.

Within a novel, of course, a Bruno or anyone else can contain eternities within his memory, and (as Bruno believed) have power over them by that means as well. After all, what exists in books is what the characters see and know; the characters possess and embody it, it extends outward from them in auras, but there is no more of it than the characters can hold, and the only reality it has is its power over the reader via the feelings and fates of the characters. Don Quixote and Odysseus are as large as we are, even though nothing more can happen to them and they can do nothing more than they do in their stories, wherein they have endless lives extending infinitely in all directions. But this endlessness and eternity are also not things, are nothing but effects of the words “endless” and “infinite,” and they withdraw into a true vacuum when the book is shut, like a slide projector turned off, all the things shown in all their color and detail extinguished. Is that then why I laughed at the prospect of a vanishing universe? Was it because, by feeling—no, by knowing, having good evidence—that the world in which I exist is at once endless and fictional, I could participate in the experience of those people I made, the experience of living in worlds made of words? Why would that be liberating, or delightful? I’ve always thought that there is an awful poignance in being a character in fiction, for all its advantages (e.g., spending so little time at work, rarely needing to go to the bathroom, and skipping the boring parts of life generally). I don’t know: but I know that whenever I experience a brief, blessed intimation that the only existence the world can have is within the living consciousness that I inhabit—and that “the world” includes all that is and all that can be, including my own death, including the persistence of the world after my death and its existence before my birth—the feeling resembles nothing so much as the charmed feeling of thinking up a book, or reading a great one.



That’s where I seemed to arrive in my own thought, with no particular mode of justifying the conception, or working out what it entailed. I am actually often apprehensive about dying—afraid of being terrified by its sudden onset, like being run over by a train, more than by the fact of it, or of being dead, which doesn’t much alarm me (so far). I didn’t think of my conception as ameliorative, or wonderfully heartening, but I did think it was so.

Then recently, in an unrelated mood, I began pondering that common paradox of mystical discourse, whether Christian or Buddhist, Zen or Sufi—the Moment in Eternity. Common, because we’ve all heard it and taken it to mean some sort of apprehension of the divine or the All in some way the mystic gets and we don’t; and a paradox, because if you experience such a moment, then it can’t ever stop, can it? It’s a moment in eternity, and every such moment would by definition be as long as eternity itself, just as any subset of infinity is itself infinite. So then what would that moment be like to experience? What would the next moment be like? Wouldn’t every subsequent moment, and all preceding or possible moments, just be further aspects of the Moment in Eternity that had swallowed up everything like a true vacuum, both the infinite and the infinitesimal? And if the mystics are right and we can all access and experience such a moment if we meditate or pray or win grace or whatever, then aren’t we already living within it, only some of us haven’t realized it yet?

To think in this way changes how existence is envisioned. We commonly speak of living as though a life were like a candle lit in a room: the candle’s lit at birth, it shows the room; the candle burns, it burns down, it goes out, but the room that was briefly illuminated remains. But what if the room, the candle, the experience of the room and the candle, the candle’s extinguishing, and the room’s continuance, actually all exist at once, always, and only, in a Moment in Eternity? We seem to sense something of this: even though we feel certain that we’ll die and everything will go on just the same without our presence, we are also prone to feeling that existence can’t go on after our deaths—it seems impossible. Have a Moment in Eternity and you’ll dissolve the paradox. You’ll know that any amount of consciousness is all consciousness; that life, and being, and our apprehension of it, go on forever in all directions within every moment. This is why, probably, the average mystic is also usually unafraid of dying or of being dead: death and dying, and his or her own being dead, exist in the Moment in Eternity that he or she experiences, and in fact cannot exist anywhere else. The reason there’s no death is that all time is now, including all the time when we are not.

I knew even as I formulated it that this notion was problematic, to say the least. It resembles the ontological proof of the existence of God, a linguistic device anybody can see through. It seems to imply an inescapable solipsism; it struck me even as I formulated it as funny. But why did those instances of mass evanescence that I thereafter learned about—the vanishing of actualities on the stock markets and then of the physical universe in the bowels of the Alps—seem to lend the idea some kind of credence? Just because it too made me laugh aloud to think of?


There are laughing philosophers and dry-eyed philosophers and gloomy philosophers. In their almost entirely opposite ways, Montaigne and Bruno were laughers—not laughing in scorn or indifference but in the delight of understanding. My friend even as he was dying of cancer remained delighted by himself and those he loved, unable to get into death, though knowing he must. Bruno’s conclusions about infinities and eternities, the stars like a jeweled bracelet in the hand, were doubtless affected by his desires—as no doubt are mine. I can’t say for sure if his understanding of the universe supported him as he went to his death; and I don’t know if my conception will help me at the same crossroads.

The question has begun to take on some urgency. Not long ago my wife came home from a consultation with her mother’s cardiologist and called up the stairs to me that those “pulled-muscle” pains I’d been having in my chest were angina and I should go to the doctor now. My blood pressure’s always been low, I’m a nonsmoker, not fat, I take my statins, I’d recently seen for myself the ultrasound of my carotid artery (“clean as a whistle” said the technician), and so I had every reason to suppose this was unnecessary—a condition medically described as “fool’s paradise.” Of course it soon appeared that I did indeed have coronary artery disease, for which I was promptly treated. Though the doctor tells me my longevity may well be unaffected, I certainly was made to think freshly of that longevity as a line with a terminus.

We all die. It’s said that we all die alone, but what that may mean we can’t know. My idea that there is no death is admittedly a negative proposition, and it is famously difficult to prove a negative. I certainly cannot prove it, or even test it, by not dying. Wittgenstein claims rightly that death is not an event in life, though dying certainly can be, and in fact sometimes (certainly not always) dying can be the locus of a Moment in Eternity itself, the soul flooded with richness and somehow in possession of the universe. (We know this from the experiences of people who died and then were resuscitated, or in some other way did not stay dead, but maybe they don’t actually count as having died at all.) It is true, and many of us have noticed it, that even for the fretful and afraid who cling to life, there can come at the end a brief time of calm clarity where all of that fades away; we usually think of it as a goodbye peace, the soul resigning life and its claims there at the frontier, but maybe it’s not that. I’ve actually witnessed it as a kind of inexplicable good cheer. Maybe it’s an understanding, granted by the dissolving physical structures, that the self does not actually at that moment face death or approach death, but has always had death as well as everything else within its view or at its fingertips: that the vision of death—of being extinguished, buried, disintegrating—is death, which can only exist as a part of life. In the midst of death we are in life.

Civilisation, its cause and cure, and other essays by Carpenter, Edward

CRT Database

 https://crtdatabase.com/

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Mishima : a vision of the void by Yourcenar, Marguerite

The whole works of homer : prince of poets in his iliads and odysses by Chapman, George

The Schooner 'Flight' by Derek Walcott

The Schooner 'Flight'
1 Adios, Carenage

In idle August, while the sea soft,
and leaves of brown islands stick to the rim
of this Carribean, I blow out the light
by the dreamless face of Maria Concepcion
to ship as a seaman on the schooner Flight.
Out in the yard turning gray in the dawn,
I stood like a stone and nothing else move
but the cold sea rippling like galvanize
and the nail holes of stars in the sky roof,
till a wind start to interfere with the trees.
I pass me dry neighbor sweeping she yard
as I went downhill, and I nearly said:
"Sweep soft, you witch, 'cause she don't sleep hard,"
but the bitch look through me like I was dead.
A route taxi pull up, park-lights still on.
The driver size up my bags with a grin:
"This time, Shabine, like you really gone!"
I ain't answer the ass, I simply pile in
the back seat and watch the sky burn
above Laventille pink as the gown
in which the woman I left was sleeping,
and I look in the rearview and see a man
exactly like me, and the man was weeping
for the houses, the street, that whole fucking island.

Christ have mercy on all sleeping things!
From that dog rotting down Wrightson Road
to when I was a dog on these streets;
if loving these islands must be my load.
out of corruption my soul takes wings,
But they had started to poison my soul
with their big house, big car, big time bohbohl,
coolie, nigger, Syrian and French Creole,
so I leave it for them and their carnival -
I taking a sea bath, I gone down the road.
I know these islands from Monos to Nassau,
a rusty head sailor with sea-green eyes
that they nickname Shabine, the patois for
any red nigger, and I, Shabine, saw
when these slums of empire was paradise.
I'm just a red nigger who love the sea,
I had a sound colonial education,
I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation,

But Maria Concepcion was all my thought
watching the sea heaving up and down
as the port side of dories, schooners, and yachts
was painted afresh by the strokes of the sun
signing her name with every reflection;
I knew when dark-haired evening put on
her bright silk at sunset, and, folding the sea,
sidled under the sheet with her starry laugh,
that there'd be no rest, there'd be no forgetting.
Is like telling mourners round the graveside
about resurrection, they want the dead back,
so I smile to myself as the bow rope untied
and the Flight swing seaward:"Is no use repeating
that the sea have more fish. I ain't want her
dressed in the sexless light of a seraph,
I want those round brown eyes like a marmoset, and
till the day when I can lean back and laugh,
those claws that tickled my back on sweating
Sunday afternoons, like a crab on wet sand."

As I worked, watching the rotting waves come
past the bow that scissor the sea like milk,
I swear to you all, by my mother's milk,
by the stars that shall fly from tonight's furnace,
that I loved them, my children, my wife, my home;
I loved them as poets love the poetry
that kills them, as drowned sailors the sea.

You ever look up from some lonely beach
and see a far schooner? Well, when I write
this poem, each phrase go be soaked in salt;
I go draw and knot every line as tight
as ropes in this rigging; in simple speech
my common language go be the wind,
my pages the sails of the schooner Flight.
But let me tell you how this business begin.


2 Raptures of the Deep

Smuggled Scotch for O'Hara, big government man,
between Cedros and the Main, so the Coast Guard couldn't touch us,
and the Spanish pirogues always met us halfway,
but a voice kept saying: "Shabine, see this business
of playing pirate?" Well, so said, so done!
That whole racket crash. And I for a woman,
for her laces and silks, Maria Concepcion.
Ay, ay! Next thing I hear, some Commission of Enquiry
was being organized to conduct a big quiz,
with himself as chairman investigating himself.
Well, I knew damn well who the suckers would be,
not that shark in shark skin, but his pilot fish,
khaki-pants red nigger like you or me.
What worse, I fighting with Maria Concepcion,
plates flying and thing, so I swear: "Not again!"
It was mashing up my house and my family.
I was so broke all I needed was shades and a cup
or four shades and four cups in four-cup Port of Spain;
all the silver I had was the coins on the sea.

You saw them ministers in The Express,
guardians of the poor - one hand at their back,
and one set o'police only guarding their house,
and the Scotch pouring in through the back door.
As for that minister-monster who smuggled the booze,
that half-Syrian saurian, I got so vex to see
that face thick with powder, the warts, the stone lids
like a dinosaur caked with primordial ooze
by the lightning of flashbulbs sinking in wealth,
that I said: "Shabine, this is shit, understand!"
But he get somebody to kick my crutch out his office
like I was some artist! That bitch was so grand,
couldn't get off his high horse and kick me himself.
I have seen things that would make a slave sick
in this Trinidad, the Limers' Republic.

I couldn't shake the sea noise out of my head,
the shell of my ears sang Maria Concepcion,
so I start salvage diving with a crazy Mick,
name O'Shaugnessy, and a limey named Head;
but this Caribbean so choke with the dead
that when I would melt in emerald water,
whose ceiling rippled like a silk tent,
I saw them corals: brain, fire, sea fans,
dead-men's-fingers, and then, the dead men.
I saw that the powdery sand was their bones
ground white from Senegal to San Salvador,
so, I panic third dive, and surface for a month
in the Seamen's Hostel. Fish broth and sermons.
When I thought of the woe I had brought my wife,
when I saw my worries with that other woman,
I wept under water, salt seeking salt,
for her beauty had fallen on me like a sword
cleaving me from my children, flesh of my flesh!

There was this barge from St. Vincent, but she was too deep
to float her again. When we drank, the limey
got tired of my sobbing for Maria Concepcion.
He said he was getting the bends. Good for him!
The pain in my heart for Maria Concepcion,
the hurt I had done to my wife and children,
was worse than the bends. In the rapturous deep
there was no cleft rock where my soul could hide
like the boobies each sunset, no sandbar of light
where I could rest, like the pelicans know,
so I got raptures once, and I saw God
like a harpooned grouper bleeding, and a far
voice was rumbling, "Shabine, if you leave her,
if you leave her, I shall give you the morning star."
When I left the madhouse I tried other women
but, once they stripped naked, their spiky cunts
bristled like sea eggs and I couldn't dive.
The chaplain came round. I paid him no mind.
Where is my rest place, Jesus? Where is my harbor?
Where is the pillow I will not have to pay for,
and the window I can look from that frames my life?


3 Shabine Leaves the Republic

I had no nation now but the imagination.
After the white man, the niggers didn't want me
when the power swing to their side.
The first chain my hands and apologize, "History";
the next said I wasn't black enough for their pride.
Tell me, what power, on these unknown rocks -
a spray-plane Air Force, the Fire Brigade,
the Red Cross, the Regiment, two, three police dogs
that pass before you finish bawling "Parade!"?
I met History once, but he ain't recognize me,
a parchment Creole, with warts
like an old sea bottle, crawling like a crab
through the holes of shadow cast by the net
of a grille balcony ; cream linen, cream hat.
I confront him and shout, "Sir, is Shabine!
They say I'se your grandson. You remember Grandma,
your black cook, at all?" The bitch hawk and spat.
A spit like that worth any number of words.
But that's all them bastards have left us: words.

I no longer believed in the revolution.
I was losing faith in the love of my woman.
I had seen that moment Aleksandr Blok
crystallize in The Twelve. Was between
the Police Marine Branch and Hotel Venezuelan
one Sunday at noon. Young men without flags
using shirts, their chests waiting for holes.
They kept marching into the mountains, and their
noise ceased as foam sinks into sand.
They sank in the bright hills like rain, every one
with his own nimbus, leaving shirts in the streets,
and the echo of power at the end of the street.
Propeller-blade fans turn over the Senate;
the judges, they say, still sweat in carmine,
on Frederick Street the idlers all marching
by standing still, the Budget turns a new leaf.
In the 12.30 movies the projectors best
not break down, or you go see revolution. Aleksandr Blok
enters and sits in the third row of pit eating choc-
olate cone, waiting for a spaghetti West-
ern with Clint Eastwood and featuring Lee Van Cleef.


4 The Flight, Passing
Blanchisseuse.

Dusk. The Flight passing Blanchisseuse.
Gulls wheel like from a gun again,
and foam gone amber that was white,
lighthouse and star start making friends,
down every beach the long day ends,
and there, on that last stretch of sand,
on a beach bare of all but light,
dark hands start pulling in the seine
of the dark sea, deep, deep inland.


5 Shabine Encounters the
Middle Passage

Man, I brisk in the galley first thing next dawn,
brewing li'l coffee; fog coil from the sea
like the kettle steaming when I put it down
slow, slow, 'cause I couldn't believe what I see:
where the horizon was one silver haze,
the fog swirl and swell into sails, so close
that I saw it was sails, my hair grip my skull,
it was horrors, but it was beautiful.
We float through a rustling forest of ships
with sails dry like paper, behind the glass
I saw men with rusty eyeholes like cannons,
and whenever their half-naked crews cross the sun,
right through their tissue, you traced their bones
like leaves against the sunlight; frigates, barkentines,
the backward-moving current swept them on,
and high on their decks I saw great admirals,
Rodney, Nelson, de Grasse, I heard the hoarse orders
they gave those Shabines, and that forest
of masts sail right through the Flight,
and all you could hear was the ghostly sound
of waves rustling like grass in a low wind
and the hissing weds they trail from the stern;
slowly they heaved past from east to west
like this round world was some cranked water wheel,
every ship pouring like a wooden bucket
dredged from the deep; my memory revolve
on all sailors before me, then the sun
heat the horizon's ring and they was mist.

Next we pass slave ships. Flags of all nations,
our fathers below deck too deep, I suppose,
to hear us shouting. So we stop shouting. Who knows
who his grandfather is, much less his name?
Tomorrow our landfall will be the Barbados.


6 The Sailor Sings Back to the
Casuarinas

You see them on the low hills of Barbados
bracing like windbreaks, needles for hurricanes,
trailing, like masts, the cirrus of torn sails;
when I was green like them, I used to think
those cypresses, leaning against the sea,
that take the sea noise up into their branches,
are not real cypresses but casuarinas.
Now captain just call them Canadian cedars.
But cedars, cypresses, or casuarinas,
whoever called them so had a good cause,
watching their bending bodies wail like women
after a storm, when some schooner came home
with news of one more sailor drowned again.
Once the sound "cypress" used to make more sense
than the green "casuarinas", though, to the wind
whatever grief bent them was all the same,
since they were trees with nothing else in mind
but heavenly leaping or to guard a grave;
but we live like our names and you would have
to be colonial to know the difference,
to know the pain of history words contain,
to love those trees with an inferior love,
and to believe: "Those casuarinas bend
like cypresses, their hair hangs down in rain
like sailors' wives. They're classic trees, and we,
if we live like the names our masters please,
by careful mimicry might become men."


7 The Flight Anchors in
Castries Harbor

When the stars self were young over Castries,
I loved you alone and I loved the whole world.
What does it matter that our lives are different?
Burdened with the loves of our different children?
When I think of your young face washed by the wind
and your voice that chuckles in the slap of the sea?
The lights are out on La Toc promontory,
except for the hospital. Across at Vigie
the marina arcs keep vigil. I have kept my own
promise, to leave you the one thing I own,
you whom I loved first: my poetry.
We here for one night. Tomorrow, the Flight will be gone.


8 Fight with the Crew

It had one bitch on board, like he had me mark -
that was the cook, some Vincentian arse
with a skin like a gommier tree, red peeling bark,
and wash-out blue eyes; he wouldn't give me a ease,
like he feel he was white. Had an exercise book,
this same one here, that I was using to write
my poetry, so one day this man snatch it
from my hand, and start throwing it left and right
to the rest of the crew,bawling out, "Catch it,"
and start mincing me like I was some hen
because of the poems. Some case is for fist,
some case is for tholing pin, some is for knife -
this one was for knife. Well, I beg him first,
but he kept reading, "O my children, my wife,"
and playing he crying, to make the crew laugh;
it move like a flying fish, the silver knife
that catch him right in the plump of his calf,
and he faint so slowly, and he turn more white
than he thought he was. I suppose among men
you need that sort of thing. It ain't right
but that's how it is. There wasn't much pain,
just plenty blood, and Vincie and me best friend,
but none of them go fuck with my poetry again.


9 Maria Concepcion & the Book of Dreams

The jet that was screeching over the Flight
was opening a curtain into the past.
"Dominica ahead!"
"It still have Caribs there."
"One day go be planes only, no more boat."
"Vince, God ain't made nigger to fly through the air."
"Progress, Shabine, that's what it's all about.
Progress leaving all we small islands behind."
I was at the wheel, Vince sitting next to me
gaffing. Crisp, bracing day. A high-running sea.
"Progress is something to ask Caribs about.
They kill them by millions, some in war,
some by forced labor dying in the mines
looking for silver, after that niggers; more
progress. Until I see definite signs
that mankind change, Vince, I ain't want to hear.
Progress is history's dirty joke.
Ask that sad green island getting nearer."
Green islands, like mangoes pickled in brine.
In such fierce salt let my wound be healed,
me, in my freshness as a seafarer.

That night, with the sky sparks frosty with fire,
I ran like a Carib through Dominica,
my nose holes choked with memory of smoke;
I heard the screams of my burning children,
I ate the brains of mushrooms, the fungi
of devil's parasols under white, leprous rocks;
my breakfast was leaf mold in leaking forests,
with leaves big as maps, and when I heard noise
of the soldiers' progress through the thick leaves,
though my heart was bursting, I get up and ran
through the blades of balisier sharper than spears:
with the blood of my race, I ran, boy, I ran
with moss-footed speed like a painted bird;
then I fall, but I fall by an icy stream under
cool fountains of fern, and a screaming parrot
catch the dry branches and I drowned at last
in big breakers of smoke; then when that ocean
of black smoke pass, and the sky turn white,
there was nothing but Progress, if Progress is
an iguana as still as a young leaf in sunlight.
I bawl for Maria, and her Book of Dreams.

It anchored her sleep, that insomniac's Bible,
a soiled orange booklet with a cyclop's eye
center, from the Dominican Republic.
Its coarse pages were black with the usual
symbols of prophecy, in excited Spanish:
an open palm upright, sectioned and numbered
like a butcher chart, delivered the future.
One night, in a fever, radiantly ill,
she say, "Bring me the book, the end has come."
She said, "I dreamt of whales and a storm,"
but for that dream, the book had no answer.
A next night I dreamed of three old women
featureless as silkworms, stitching my fate,
and I scream at them to come out of my house,
and I try beating them away with a broom,
but as they go out, so they crawl back again,
until I start screaming and crying, my flesh
raining with sweat, and she ravage the book
for the dream meaning, and there was nothing;
my nerves melt like a jellyfish - that was when I broke -
they found me round the Savannah, screaming:

All you see me talking to the wind, so you think I mad.
Well, Shabine has bridled the horses of the sea;
you see me watching the sun till my eyeballs seared,
so all you mad people feel Shabine crazy,
but all you ain't know my strength, hear? The coconuts
standing by in their regiments in yellow khaki,
they waiting for Shabine to take over these islands,
and all you best dread the day I am healed
of being a human. All you fate in my hand,
ministers, businessmen, Shabine have you, friend,
I shall scatter your lives like a handful of sand,
I who have no weapon but poetry and
the lances of palms and the sea's shining shield!


10 Out of the Depths

Next day, dark sea. A arse-aching dawn.
"Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind."
The slow swell start cresting like some mountain range
with snow on the top.
"Ay, skipper, sky dark!"
"This ain't right for August."
"This light damn strange,
this season, sky should be clear as a field."

A stingray steeplechase across the sea,
tail whipping water, the high man-o'-wars
start reeling inland, quick, quick an archery
of flying fish miss us! Vince say: "You notice?"
and a black-mane squall pounce on the sail
like a dog on a pigeon, and it snap the neck
of the Flight and shake it from head to tail.
"Be Jesus, I never see sea get so rough
so fast! That wind come from God back pocket!"
"Where Cap'n headin? Like the man gone blind!"
"If we's to drong, we go drong, Vince, fock-it!"
"Shabine, say your prayers, if life leave you any!"

I have not loved those that I loved enough.
Worse than the mule kick of Kick-'Em-Jenny
Channel, rain start to pelt the Flight between
mountains of water. If I was frighten?
The tent poles of water spouts bracing the sky
start wobbling, clouds unstitch at the seams
and sky water drench us, and I hear myself cry,
"I'm the drowned sailor in her Book of Dreams."
I remembered those ghost ships, I saw me corkscrewing
to the sea bed of sae worms, fathom past fathom,
my jaw clench like a fist, and only one thing
hold me, trembling, how my family safe home.
Then a strength like it seize me and the strength said:
"I from backward people who still fear God."
Let Him, in His might, heave Leviathan upward
by the winch of His will, the beast pouring lace
from his sea-bottom bed; and that was the faith
that had fade from a child in the Methodist chapel
in Chisel Street, Castries, when the whale-bell
sang service and, in hard pews ribbed like the whale,
proud with despair, we sang how our race
survive the sea's maw, our history, our peril,
and now I was ready for whatever death will.
But if that storm had strength, was in Cap'n face,
beard beading with spray, tears salting his eyes,
crucify to his post, that nigger hold fast
to that wheel, man, like the cross held Jesus,
and the wounds of his eyes like they crying for us,
and I feeding him white rum, while every crest
with Leviathan-lash made the Flight quail
like two criminal. Whole night, with no rest,
till red-eyed like dawn, we watch our travail
subsiding, subside, and there was no more storm.
And the noon sea get calm as Thy Kingdom come.


11 After the Storm

There's a fresh light that follows a storm
while the whole sea still havoc; in its bright wake
I saw the veiled face of Maria Concepcion
marrying the ocean, then drifting away
in the widening lace of her bridal train
with white gulls her bridesmaids, till she was gone.
I wanted nothing after that day.
Across my own face, like the face of the sun,
a light rain was falling, wih the sea calm.

Fall gently, rain, on the sea's upturned face
like a girl showering; make these islands fresh
as Shabine once knew them! Let every trace,
every hot road, smell like clothes she just press
and sprinkle with drizzle. I finish dream;
whatever the rain wash and the sun iron:
the white clouds, the sea and sky wih one seam,
is clothes enough for my nakedness.
Though my Flight never pass the incoming tide
of this inland sea beyond the loud reefs
of the final Bahamas, I am satisfied
if my hand gave voice to one people's grief.
Open the map. More islands there, man,
than peas on a tin plate, all different size,
one thousand in the Bahamas alone,
from mountains to low scrub with coral keys,
and from this bowsprit, I bless every town,
the blue smell of smoke in hills behind them,
and the one small road winding down them like twine
to the roofs below; I have only one theme:
The bowsprit, the arrow, the longing, the lunging heart -
the flight to a target whose aim we'll never know,
vain search for an island that heals with its harbor
and a guiltless horizon, where the almond's shadow
doesn't injure the sand. There are so many islands!
As many islands as the stars at night
like falling fruit around the schooner Flight.
But things must fall, and so it always was,
on one hand Venus, on the other Mars;
fall, and are one, just as this earth is one
island in archipelago's of stars.
My first friend was the sea. Now, is my last.
I stop talking now. I work, then I read,
cotching under a lantern hooked to the mast.
I try to forget what happiness was,
and when that don't work, I study the stars.
Sometimes is just me, and the soft-scissored foam
as the deck turn white and the moon open
a cloud like a door, and the light over me
is a road in white moonlight taking me home.
Shabine sang to you from the depths of the sea.

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To His Mistress Going to Bed By John Donne

 Come, Madam, come, all rest my powers defy,

Until I labour, I in labour lie.

The foe oft-times having the foe in sight,

Is tir’d with standing though he never fight.

Off with that girdle, like heaven’s Zone glistering,

But a far fairer world encompassing.

Unpin that spangled breastplate which you wear,

That th’eyes of busy fools may be stopped there.

Unlace yourself, for that harmonious chime,

Tells me from you, that now it is bed time.

Off with that happy busk, which I envy,

That still can be, and still can stand so nigh.

Your gown going off, such beauteous state reveals,

As when from flowery meads th’hill’s shadow steals.

Off with that wiry Coronet and shew

The hairy Diadem which on you doth grow:

Now off with those shoes, and then safely tread

In this love’s hallow’d temple, this soft bed.

In such white robes, heaven’s Angels used to be

Received by men; Thou Angel bringst with thee

A heaven like Mahomet’s Paradise; and though

Ill spirits walk in white, we easily know,

By this these Angels from an evil sprite,

Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright.

    Licence my roving hands, and let them go,

Before, behind, between, above, below.

O my America! my new-found-land,

My kingdom, safeliest when with one man mann’d,

My Mine of precious stones, My Empirie,

How blest am I in this discovering thee!

To enter in these bonds, is to be free;

Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be.

    Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,

As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth’d must be,

To taste whole joys. Gems which you women use

Are like Atlanta’s balls, cast in men’s views,

That when a fool’s eye lighteth on a Gem,

His earthly soul may covet theirs, not them.

Like pictures, or like books’ gay coverings made

For lay-men, are all women thus array’d;

Themselves are mystic books, which only we

(Whom their imputed grace will dignify)

Must see reveal’d. Then since that I may know;

As liberally, as to a Midwife, shew

Thy self: cast all, yea, this white linen hence,

There is no penance due to innocence.

    To teach thee, I am naked first; why then

What needst thou have more covering than a man.