Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Pencil sketches [aboard the Carnival Miracle, early June, 2009]


Grand Turk Island, morning, 6/4/09

Phthalo? No, not that intense blue hue. Rich Ultramarine perhaps, with Cerulean sky behind clouds of Titanium White, themselves under-girded with hints of Payne's Gray.

I've known that sky, but not this ocean! Blue on green on colors too strange in context and juxtaposition to name -- much less mix on palette.

The meaning of watercolor is now for ever changed.


Mimic

From the ship the sand of the beach mimics the sand of home. Up close, it displays its parentage to those who ask: coral by coral it is, not northern quartz out of granite.

I'm a stranger here on this alien beach in this foreign world.


Resources

I try to take what my eyes see here and mold it, shape it, transpose it into words.


But eyes have no dictionary and can't spell very well.


Strangers

I would know the people of Grand Turk Island, but they're busy making their livings. They have no time to spare now -- our ship here for so few hours. We pass without touching each other.

Sailing time arrives too soon for us all.


Doodles

We're back aboard. It's air-conditioned, orderly, quietly civilized. Free pizza by the slice in six variations.
The little biting flies of the water's edge have no passports.


It's back. The subtle shuddering of the decking, a slight shiver in the bones of the ship. The engines are up again. We're breaking our tenuous ties to this too-briefly seen land. Adrift again with fragmented memories of things sensed. The tip of the island is just visible in the window, slipping astern. My face feels the furnace sun's touch even yet.
I look out again and see only sea. The ship, it's dock-nap over, is again full awake.


At sea, 6/4/09

Directions:

Writing can be frustrating work. It's hard to wring reality out. First to go is space: three dimensions compressed, squeezed into two. Next are the colors and the sounds. Smells also fade, disappear. Taste is gone. Touch is reduced to the feel of dry paper.
My sense of the world shrinks, becomes the image of black letters forming, one by one, words -- those strange things -- on a white background.

Reader! To a generous helping of words, add Life. Stir gently to mix. Season to taste.


Serbia's unofficial ambassador

One of the waiters at our evening meal is, without knowing it, performing an extraordinary feat. His name tag gives his home country as Serbia. The US news media, almost without exception, has painted Serbia in dark and sinister tones for several years. Americans are expected to harbor no love for that misfortuned nation.

Perhaps totally unaware of this, our waiter is simply himself: a man of great good heart and warm, outgoing nature. All alone, he nightly wrestles with the image fixed in my mind by the press and, with gentle word and guileless smile, defeats it with the skill and grace of a blackjack dealer turning over his hole card.
He has become a trusted friend in these too few days. We shall truly miss him. Once more home ashore, I shall drink to his health with dark, aged slivovitz.


Lido deck, 9PM

Country and western music. The usual something about somebody doin' someone wrong.
Ship's officers in white walk past, speaking quietly in soft Italian syllables.
We're making 21 knots, heading nor'west somewhere east of the Bahamas.
I sit and sip my coffee and wonder where everyone is. There's not a passenger to be seen.
The sea is calm tonight. Overcast hides a half moon.

All is blackness outside the window.


Half Moon Cay, 7AM, 6/5/09

Early morning, and we're a few miles off Half Moon Cay. Far, far to the north the Hudson River flows south past Beacon, under the Tappan Zee Bridge and on past New York to the sea. Its waters once knew for a brief moment the hull of the ship which shared its name with this obscure Bahamian isle.
The sea is gray this morning, shielded from the tropical colors by an overcast dawn sky. Gray -- like the color of the waters near the Hudson River's mouth.

Gray is the color of history, too. Time blurs the sharp distinctions of black and white.

People are a-stir in their cabins. Today will soon enter, stage left, for Act I. Scene I.


Second Breakfast

The first is driven, commandeered by insensitive, impatient Hunger.

The second, though, is contemplative. Choices are carried out to the next starboard column of significance. The luxury of unassigned time fleshes out the anticipation and refines the experience.

Nuances matter.


Relationships

A huge ship of steel! Steel ribs. Steel plates. Steel decks. All painted in brilliant white.
Inside, she glows with the rich browns of lovingly polished woods.

Steel is newly come to our specie's awareness. Wood, in contrast, has been our companion for millennia. Wood's warmth shields us from the harsh reality of cold modern metal much as the steel of the ship protects us from the forces of the sea.


Wordplay

Here comes the tender alongside. A quirk of language bestows the same word on a small boat in service to a ship as to a boat of poor lateral stability -- a 'tippy' boat.

In what coin does the ship tip the tender for extraordinary service, I wonder?


Waiting for afternoon

There's no one in the hot tub. No one in the pool. A few people sit, and sip, and read. Some gently graze the counters of food displayed, provided in great abundance.

The tenders come alongside, exchange people with the ship and leave again for the cay. I sip coffee and wait for my Lady, my party of one, to return. And for the afternoon to begin. It's really the same thing, you see. An afternoon without my Lady is not really an afternoon, but something less.

I scribble words in my journal.

It's so quiet ...


Wardrobe change

In the casino they're replacing the felts on the blackjack tables with new ones while the passengers are ashore.

The joyful gamblers of the evening hours must never see that Lady Luck's garments have become tattered and faded ... that hope, too, grows old.


Sunday, northward, 6/6/09

7AM

Cabin beside cabin, deck atop deck, people sleeping away the debris of the night or snuggling into a last quick blanketed nap before breakfast.

Above them Horatio's hoards the early morning quiet. I sit there, sipping dark coffee, watching the water and enjoying the last of the ebbing silence.

Our cruise, like the sunlit skies above the inky depths of the sea, brightens for a moment the surface of our lives.


Two ocean views

The ocean presents its surface to the eye as a myriad of glittering wavelets.

It's only later, by looking very carefully, that we can sense the underlying pattern of slowly advancing swells.



Tiny yellow ocher plants in patches the size of dinner plates, adrift in rows on an intensely blue ocean.

What strange creatures come to graze these miniature pastures?



Tea time and courage

The falling tide of British colonialism left behind many traditions stranded in strange places. One of them, tea time, managed to stow aboard our cruise ship.

In the afternoon on sea days we savor tempting cakes in an aural setting of classical music. A young lady sits at the piano, playing perhaps as much for herself as for the little groups of people chatting comfortably at the tables. I wonder if she would feel it an intrusion if I rose and turned pages for her? I remain seated. Waiters circulate silently. The music, far more than the cakes, satisfies a hunger for me.

Do the people listening know the endless hours of practice behind the apparently effortless unfolding of the pages of Clair de Lune? What do they understand of sight-reading musical scoring? Have they ever heard Suite bergamasque in its entirety?

Why courage? Our talented, unassuming pianist, now many miles and many months away from her Romanian homeland, is making her way in a world of strangers with nothing but her playing to protect her. Do the listeners, the tea-sippers, know that? Do they see that she relies only on the armor of the most abstract, most transparent and most fleeting of all the arts ... music?

Like British traditions, courage can be found in unexpected places. It was present in that lounge, alive and well in the heart of young lady seated at the piano, bringing to life once again the music, the beautiful legacy of Claude Debussy.



People notes

Musical notes are much the same as people. Those with true staying power are clothed in the plainest dress. The brilliantly beribboned semihemidemiquavers last but an instant.



Monday, last day at sea, 6/8/09

Lido deck, 7AM

Coffee. Warm, rich, freshly brewed.

The ancient Egyptians had their Ceremony of the Opening of the Mouth. I indulge myself in a slow, ritual observance of the opening of my eyes.

Coffee.

Warm.

Rich.

Freshly brewed.



Today and tomorrow

Complex cities of clouds float above the horizon. At sea there are no trees, no hills, no buildings to block the view. The world of land will soon close in around us. The far horizon will be no more.

This is our last day to enjoy the magic of the Miracle. We exist in the moment. Tomorrow we'll be putting the last of our things into bags, closing zippers, peering into dark closets and drawer corners seeking possible stowaways.

Then we'll trundle our gear off the ship.

Everyday waits patiently for us at the dock.

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