sovay | And most wickedly I did as I sailed

Just got back from seeing Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest with my family. I realize that I am building up a positive backlog of posts that must be made about this, that, or the other, but I must here take a moment to say:

DAVY JONES' SAILORS.

DUDE.

Whatever the flaws of the overall film, that entire thread just made me smile. Stellan Skarsgård's Bootstrap Bill plays right into one of my favorite character obsessions, and if someone was going to fuse the legends of Davy Jones and the Flying Dutchman (not to mention Koschei the Deathless), this was actually quite a good way. It's the combination of metamorphosis—so long under sea that the sea has changed them into itself, like something out of Patricia McKillip or Caitlín R. Kiernan—and moral compromise, tarnish and sea-change. As

matociquala might say: kicked me right in the squid.

Er. So to speak.

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I suspect sea-change, or at least metamorphosis, is part of the reason I love "The Black Swan," an aria from Gian Carlo Menotti's The Medium (1946). A woman calls out to the swan to find where her lover has disappeared to, and learns that he's drowned in the river with their wedding ring:

Don't you hear your lover moan?
Eyes of glass and feet of stone
Shells for teeth and weeds for tongue
Deep, deep down in the river's bed
He's looking for the ring
Eyes wide open, never asleep
He's looking for the ring, looking for the ring . . .

The song terrified me the first time I heard it; and now it's my standard audition aria. I love it.

And most wickedly I did as I sailed

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