In praise of cruising - An Encouragement Of Ancients - courtesy of my friend Richard Lamb
* * We are born struggling against the simple obligation to breathe. Immediately we begin reinventing the wheels of relationship with those around us. We learn first to identify our mother (easy, she has the nipple) and thence forward and outward into the bewildering, infinitely expanding universe of blood relationships. Our fathers and our cousins and our sisters and our aunts have little meaning to us since they seem to be absent of nipples. And all this before we are barely a year old. In this first 12 months of existence we learn we must carefully prepare ourselves for the second 12 months. And in the second, for the third, and the third the fourth and so on until, upon completing our formal education, we realize all this preparation has been aimed at enabling us to feed ourselves and making it possible to avoid boredom in the approaching years of adulthood. Our society, our genes and our uncontrollable chemistry conspire throughout our unconscious immaturity, to prepare us to be of some undefined use to the world. We learn the habit of preparation, of getting ready to do that "wonderful thing" for ourselves and our world. For some of us that wonderful thing is simply a family,as satisfying as was the Bomb for Oppenheimer. Some of us make what an old rabbi friend called "a permanent contribution," unalterably altering society, affecting an unquenchable genetic twist, or, taking a moment of someone else's poetry, making a footprint in the sandy loam of history. These works, good and bad, all start with preparation. Find the nipple so you can suck, suck so you can grow, grow so you can learn and thus be prepared, like Boy Scouts, to pleasurably live out your adultage. So what about our dotage? How come the process halts for our silver locks and golden years? Why does age come upon us as such a damned surprise, so unlike the advent of adulthood, which was endlessly planned for, anticipated, manipulated? If we can spend the first five years getting ready for Kindergarten should we not be allowed, if not forced, to spend some of the ensuing fifty preparing for Altengarten? Unless you are unlucky in that great genetic lottery in the sky, you can go on physically and emotionally, with little qualitative degradation, until some jealous husband or errant wisp of industrial waste lays you low. If your genes are good you can screw until doomsday and leave behind a brood who can, in their turn, screw until doomsday. If you like to see form in stone you may, as Jacques Lipschitz wished for, remain toujours verde, chipping away the excess, until, as your century approaches, you topple dizzily off a forty-foot scaffold to an honorable artist's death. If you crave physical adventure you may, like that other Jacques, the venerable Cousteau, open a watery universe new to man, absorbing in the process the defenses against age of the undying carp. If you like to write, and if you have something to say, look about at the scribbling Ancients who go on writing long after you have forgotten how to read. You all know these accomplished Ancients. Perhaps there is one around the corner from you, or in your own living room? Or, if you are lucky, you may have one in your own bedroom. Escape from artificially-imposed senility happens to too few. The crystal laws of chance say there should be more escapes, but the murky laws of society declare age to be a communicable disease that requires either boring isolation or the pointless pursuit of death on the golf course, the rich man's route to heaven. The young deprive the Ancients of the responsibility for their lives out of fear and distaste for oldness. They forget they will in turn be so deprived by their own young. How to avoid the smothering ministrations of your frightened children? How to regain the manly (and womanly) captaincy of your soul? It is really very easy. Remember the lesson of your mother's nipple. Become the world's oldest Boy Scout. Prepare! Prepare! Prepare for old age with all the passion that you prepared for life. Create an ambience for ancientness that allows the full range of your powers. Pick a field of endeavor that encourages the sobriquet of "sage" rather than "old fart". Store up the wisdom that youth forgets. Become the amazing encyclopedia of a tiny specialty needed only occasionally and thus not a full career for the young. Find yourself a padded niche in which your hoar-dom achieves sanctity, the whiteness of your beard hints at purity, and a masquerade of decrepitude invites honorable assistance. And never, never, never stop screwing. A ninety-year-old test pilot may make a wonderful onetime contribution. An ancient linebacker might, with his demise on the field, provide the obligatory stopping of the clock, endowing a much needed moment of rest upon his teammates. Parachute jumping is certainly within the capabilities of the Ancient and the sport can provide a genetically terminal jumper the interesting option of not pulling his ripcord. These are useful suicides, examples of once-only, grand gestures, a last gasp of audacity that costs the gasper very little and saves his children a bundle. Suicides, however, are not available to Ancients. Our perverse society defines useful suicide as heroism. In war, heroism is a disease of the young and the healthy. Why should not all wars be fought by the Ancients? There would be little additional loss to society, since the combatants are on their way out anyway, and there would be fewer deaths due to the slower and more dignified pace of battle. The Ancient who wants to remain honored and useful amidst the juvenescent oxen must steal back from them the reins of his existence. He must define his function, not in terms of his strengths, but, in terms of their weaknesses. He must choose, early in his life, fields of endeavor in which, like old wine tasters and art experts, he can go on forever. He must tailor his activity to his physical capabilities (ongoing rather than one-time). He must convince the young that acquired wisdom and an occasional and satisfying tumescence compares favorably to mindless erection. The effective Ancient will have long since learned that chance is really not chance at all, that risk is mathematics and that most perceived wisdom is a process of the slow release of information to the uninitiated. A cloak of mystery is the very best screen for the shallowness of all human knowledge and our society has already equated mystery with age. Witches are withered, sages are hoary, kings are venerable, Methuselah lived nine hundred years and who but the immortal Mel Brooks could ever conceive of a Young Frankenstein? Preserve and heighten the mysteries. Narrow the field until the horny young oxen have great trouble squeezing through the gate. Then will you be honored, listened to, fed at the head of the table and beset by maidens intent on testing their beauty and your reluctance. Your more slowly gathering strength will be appreciated as sexual patience and sensitivity, your period of excitation, lengthened by age, will be put to good and adored use by the hitherto hastily unsatisfied maidens and you, you old goat, can saunter down the hill past the frantic oxen and bang 'em all. There exists one activity so clearly meant for Ancients, so perfectly tailored to their physical capabilities, so cleverly designed to preserve and enhance their vitality that it is bewildering that few, so very few, ever discover it. It is an activity that has as its prime precondition the slow and unconscious absorption of experience. It is an activity that enlivens the muscles as it oils the joints. It lengthens, preserves and juicifies life. It throws the practitioner among the beautiful and adoring young. It confers an inviolable mantle of authority and allows you to wear a cute hat. It takes you to faraway places, unreachable by jet by your richer and more moribund contemporaries. It tempts your taste buds with exotic offerings and disallows constipation by scaring the shit out of you. It fills your Ancient eyes with new wonder. It contradicts the cynics and negates the naysayers. It is the way a man, especially an old guy, should live. And perhaps best of all, you may, if you choose (and why not?) use it to wallow luxuriously in the soothing mud hole of the world's envy. When the alarums and excursions of your life are over, when your kids are doctors and your wives have found better things to do, when your enemies have had their comeuppances and your friends all bore you, when obituaries prove interesting and when the prospect of earning even one more dollar appalls, then the moment has come to look about for a boat in which to sail around the work There simply ain't nothin' else worth doing. Long-distance sailing is the perfect antidote for age. Everything on a sailboat is done slowly, thoughtfully and in a rhythm much better suited to the experience of de-1 cades than to the inexperience of years. Cruising requires no great expenditure of energy or strength. It is an activity in which hard-acquired skills and subtle bits of information are substituted for the arrogance of young muscle. Old muscle, miserly of its ergs, is perfectly capable of getting all the jobs done that need doing. And when the chips are down and the winds are up and the sea is set on teaching you a lesson, then a young back is no more capable of addressing the sea's immeasurable force than is an old one. Us old guys are a garrulous lot. We have a lot of miles under our belt, a whole world of experience. We discover, in our senescence, that we know a lot of things. We want to talk about them and to pass them along to the young 'uns. But what greenling wants to be regaled by a grandpapa about his victories on the golf course, or on Seventh Avenue, or how he snared the best seat at the east wall? Yet what sappy progeny, just beginning to sense the wide wonder of the world being offered, will not sit in open-mouthed delight at the tales of derring-do from a lean and leathery ancestor who smells a little funny and wears a cute hat? If nothing else, the cruising life will guarantee a rapt audience forever. The cardinal difference between an old sailor and a young one is that the old sailor has had the leisure to acquire all the myriad skills necessary for successful cruising. But the process must start early. Time must be stolen from diapers and current events. The questionable delights of the cocktail party must be passed up and the comfort of sleeping in on a rainy Sunday morning must be sacrificed to the need to know how your little boat will act in a squall. The old salts who came before you, all great sailors and all lousy writers, must be read for the lessons they teach. Celestial navigation must be conquered, and like so many of us before you, you must hang out of the bedroom window sighting the moon reflected in a dish of water, endlessly proving and reproving that your house is where you damn well know it is. And over the years you must beg passages on the boats of more fortunate friends. You must pester them for knowledge and stand your watch and then stand their watch alongside them, lest you miss some sensate sliver of input that will save your life three decades hence. You must be cook, washerup, deck ape and gofer, all in the maniacal pursuit of experience. You must become a royal pain in the ass, but a dependable one who gives back effort and loyalty to compensate for the endless nagging of the skipper for information. You must spend your life preparing so you will have a full life to live when your old life is over. And when, for the first time, you head your boat out into the open sea, only then will you understand what the preparation was about. You will be free. Free of the constraints and the tch-tch's of society, free of our imperfect laws, free of the embarrassment and guilt of family and finally free of death. For you have passed through death already in leaving your first life behind. Death can never hold terror for you again. An old song says it best. "Good-by to things that bore me, Life is waiting for me. I see a new horizon, My life has only begun, Beyond the blue horizon Lies a rising Sun." BEYOND THE BLUE HORIZON Copyright (c) 1930 by Whiting, Harling and Robin. Reese Palley Prologue Unlikely Passages Hope you liked it! L8R Skip, still toiling away in the boat yard Morgan 461 #2 SV Flying Pig KI4MPC See our galleries at www.justpickone.org/skip/gallery ! Follow us at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TheFlyingPigLog and/or http://groups.google.com/group/flyingpiglog "Believe me, my young friend, there is *nothing*-absolutely nothing-half so much worth doing as simply messing, messing-about-in-boats; messing about in boats-or *with* boats. In or out of 'em, it doesn't matter. Nothing seems really to matter, that's the charm of it. Whether you get away, or whether you don't; whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you're always busy, and you never do anything in particular; and when you've done it there's always something else to do, and you can do it if you like, but you'd much better not." _______________________________________________ Liveaboard mailing list [email protected] To adjust your membership settings over the web http://liveaboardonline.com/mailman/listinfo/liveaboard To subscribe send an email to [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] The archives are at http://www.liveaboardonline.com/pipermail/liveaboard/ To search the archives http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] The Mailman Users Guide can be found here http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-member/index.html
