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Even though she cost him all he had to lose
Since I still feel like a train fell on me, I curled up on the couch downstairs and watched first David Lean's Brief Encounter (1945) and then John Ford's The Long Voyage Home (1940). The former I found lovely and classic; the latter I want to own. It was the perfect film for me to watch right now. It's an Odyssey with no νόστος: the only real home for its sailors is either the sea itself or their awaiting deaths; the land is more alien to them than the water, but they all dream of it. It is not out of key with Kipling, either. And there are small points that the drama crests toward, the four one-act plays by Eugene O'Neill out of which the script was adaptated, but really it's one seam out of a narrative that starts nowhere and never stops; sea-like. But for others the long voyage home never ends. The film was made in 1940 and the action has been updated from World War I to II, but wartime is an incidental condition. It's the sea that calls you and the sea that never lets you go; it cuts you off and it binds you together. I don't mean the stories are nihilistic. People matter—who you hold on to, who you keep faith with, who you don't leave behind. (To be discussed in comments, if anyone wants to. I am too tired to deal with cut-tags and synopses that don't run on.) But the sea doesn't care. It was here first. You can swear to love till the seas run dry, but you can't outlive the ocean. I don't find this an upsetting thought. I think we've established already I'm not normal.
And some are drowned in deep water,
And some in sight o' shore,
And word goes back to the weary wife
And ever she sends more.
—Rudyard Kipling, "The Sea-Wife" (1893)
And some are drowned in deep water,
And some in sight o' shore,
And word goes back to the weary wife
And ever she sends more.
—Rudyard Kipling, "The Sea-Wife" (1893)
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As a kid (and still today), that is one reason why I loved being in the woods. I could get away to the woods--because the woods didn't care, the woods just was. It was a wild existence that didn't have anything at all to do with "the fury and mire of human veins."
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I speak more about the sea, but forest is my other landscape. As a small child, I used to spend so much time in trees.
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Thank you!
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I can understand sea-longing, but it's not mine; mine is the yearning for cool green forest-depths and hillsides and the granite bones of mountains rising out of the tangled growth of the forest floor.
There's an age there, and a timeless constancy, that reminds me with every breath that all of this has been here for centuries and will be after I'm gone too, and my life and all my hurried moments are nothing but a slow breath to it. I find it deeply comforting.
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You speak of it well, too.
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The introduction is Psalm 107:23-30 - "Those who go down to the sea in ships", you can hear the waves as you read it.
Oh, wonderful. Thank you.
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Also, now I'm wondering if you've taken any sea voyages, and if so, how you made it back to land :)
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I love his poems. I don't think he's as well-known for them now as he deserves; a fair number were set to music and so can be found as songs (performed by Bellamy himself or by folksingers like John Roberts and Tony Barrand), but almost all had music in them to begin with. And he can very often do personification without making it maudlin or simplistic, his narrators are often complex, and he can really do the sea.
Our brows are bound with spindrift and the weed is on our knees;
Our loins are battered ’neath us by the swinging, smoking seas.
From reef and rock and skerry—over headland, ness, and voe—
The Coastwise Lights of England watch the ships of England go!
—"The Coastwise Lights"
Blind in the hot blue ring
Through all my points I swing—
Swing and return to shift the sun anew.
Blind in my well-known sky
I hear the stars go by,
Mocking the prow that cannot hold one true!
—"The Derelict"
Who holds the rein upon you?
The latest gale let free.
What meat is in your mangers?
The glut of all the sea.
’Twixt tide and tide’s returning
Great store of newly dead,—
The bones of those that faced us,
And the hearts of those that fled.
—"White Horses"
Enjoy!
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Kipling was in the wrong place at the wrong time, I'm afraid. He was a marvelous writer. I loved most of his poems between the sections of the Jungle Book.
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Never anywhere freer than a ferry (and when much younger, whale-watches); I would like to. Mostly I live on coastlines and look out to sea. Talking about The Long Voyage Home last night,
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Awesome.
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It's why the people who insist that not to believe in their particular god takes all the wonder out of the world bewilder me—is it not enough to know that the world is here?
At the risk of answering a rhetorical question with something you already know...
Then there are the cowards for whom wonder is a terror...
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It's all right; I know how it works intellectually, but I still don't understand.
Mortality makes the world a very strong wine, and I suppose it's not fair to begrudge people their water, but ... yeh.
You are good with language, you know that?
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And thank you.
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You're Abby-someone, then?
(Insert Marty Feldman eyes here....)
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It just says that on the jar my brain came in . . .
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Yes. Currently it seems to exist on DVD only as a part of a John Wayne box set—and he is quite good in the film, as one of the four or five characters around whom the narrative is built—but maybe Criterion will pick it up? In my dreams . . .
And why should one want to outlive the ocean? Where else is heaven for those whose hearts she holds?
You should also read Patricia McKillip's Something Rich and Strange (1994). "You hold all of our hearts in your heart."
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Well, Spouse is a John Wayne fan, so if I have to pick it up that way, he'll doubtless appreciate the other movies in the set.
Also, I was very sad not to grab Something Rich and Strange before it disappeared from the bookstore shelves. Now it's a bit on the pricy side.
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I found it by itself—ordered from Amazon.com, will be shown to as many friends as I can keep from escaping. And then I will have "Gentlemen-Rankers" stuck in my head for another two weeks.
May Something Rich and Strange surface soon in a used book store near you.