sovay: (Otachi: Pacific Rim)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2025-09-19 10:18 am

And the shrouds hum full of the gale of the grave and the keel goes out to the sea

In honor of International Talk Like a Pirate Day, I respectfully wish to submit that if I had just had scurvy, this whole week would have been much easier. Have a suspicious ghost crab, the Changelings' "Port Royale" (1998), and Tim Eriksen rocking out Bellamy's setting of Kipling's "Poor Honest Men" (2011). In keeping with the recent influx of Kevin McNally in the eighteenth century, when I get back to my stack of DVDs I could just rewatch Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006). For all the varied and undeniable flaws of those second two films, their sea-iconography has clung to me like dream-wrack for nearly twenty years and I wouldn't have a cycle of stories without them.
theseatheseatheopensea: Illustration of The vain jackdaw, by Harrison Weir, from Aesop's Fables. (Vain jackdaw.)

[personal profile] theseatheseatheopensea 2025-09-19 09:31 pm (UTC)(link)
"Yes! The voices of the drowned are turned into seagulls—the voices of the wave and the seagull, of death and the seagull! You have only to shut your eyes and they come up from the drowned horrors of your own sea, your own past. I'd know those voices anywhere—I'd know those voices after a million years. The crying of the poor damned seagulls—the crying of the seagull dead!"

Ohh, that would have been an instant buy for me too!

I think you should!

I already have a bird tattoo (a phoenix bird that's even older than the 20,000 leagues one,so it's pretty beat up), but I can't resist having this one on my list of potential tattoo ideas!! (Do you have any, bird or sea or something else-inspired?)
theseatheseatheopensea: Blurry photo of Peter Hammill. (Find I'm befriended in a foreign town.)

[personal profile] theseatheseatheopensea 2025-09-19 09:57 pm (UTC)(link)
One of my formative picture books was Holling Clancy Holling's Seabird (1948).

I can see why! That's some really beautiful art! <3 Tiny me is impressed (and offers another formative thing in return!)

(No, but I admire them on other people! What form did your Verne one take?)

I imagine you with a mermaid tattoo for some reason! <3 Mine is of the phrase "mobilis in mobili".
theseatheseatheopensea: Ed from Our Flag Means Death and his piece of red silk. (Red silk.)

[personal profile] theseatheseatheopensea 2025-09-20 05:19 am (UTC)(link)
"Loca de risa, la espuma del mar."

What a lovely formative thing!


Isn't it? She has so many good ones that it's hard to pick a favourite, but that one's right there at the top!

Thank you so much! If I had one, a mermaid or a dragon would be the likeliest bets: something from out of or across the sea.

I knew it! <3 <3 <3