In a shoreside job that is not always
intellectually stimulating but often quite mundane, I frequently find myself
being led by the uncontrollable force of memory to the sea. While performing my appointed tasks largely
on autopilot, thoughts of ships and voyages and ports and crewmen crowd upon my
mind. They come and go in a steady
stream. Some enter, pause only briefly,
and then leave as quickly as they came.
Others linger longer and allow me some time to focus on them. Still others remain for hours and induce me
to take notes and look something up after I get home. And a few special thoughts compel me to write
about them.
Like a character in a Modernist novel, I do
my work amid “the flow of thoughts of the waking mind”[1]
with its “impressions, emotions, [and] reminiscences, often without logical
sequence.”[2] Thus I may start the day recalling a
transpacific voyage aboard the Comet,
then consider the calculations for the local hour angle of Aries, next remember
taking evening stars aboard the Rigel
in mid Atlantic, and finally recall the stability formulas for determining a
ship’s center of buoyancy and metacentric height. By then, it’s time for lunch. I resume my seafaring stream of consciousness
in the afternoon. Often I think of
people—crewmen full of tall tales because they’ve gone everywhere and done
everything, and docksiders full of even taller tales because they’ve gone
nowhere and done nothing. And
frequently, as interruptions from the job at hand arise, my mind flits idly
from one thing to another “without logical sequence.” Hence my meditations on the sight reduction
tables may be cut short and replaced by recollections of my first transit of
the Panama Canal aboard the Mercury.
Then, at the end of the workday, I return
to the present, go home, and tend to the family. It’s a good life.
For all these hours of idle reminiscing,
though, there are greater hours of philosophical contemplation on what I think
of as the mysticism of the sea. The
cargo ships that carried me across the oceans were, of course, man-made objects
built for strictly utilitarian purposes.
There was really nothing spiritual or mystical about them, no matter how
remarkable they may have been as works of engineering and technology.
The sea, however, is an element of
Creation. As such, it abounds in spiritual and mystical qualities. I think of this often. In my mind’s eye I gaze upon the surface of
the sea and then look upward to the dome of the sky. I recall many dark starlit nights, and some
nights with a full moon faintly illuminating the gray horizon. I remember many sunrises and sunsets, some
with extraordinarily colored cloud banks hovering in the distance. I consider the action of the wind upon the
water, and note the undulations of the waves and swells across the surface. I feel these elements of Nature, too, as the
ship rides through the water and as the wind blows through my hair. The wildlife of the sea participate as
well. Dolphins frolic in the bow wave. Flying fish dart from wave crest to wave
crest. Seagulls perch in the
rigging, The sciences of oceanography,
meteorology, astronomy, and biology surround the ship and its crew, and their
natural beauties bear witness to the genius of a Creator-God.
I contemplate this magnificence of Nature
in Augustinian metaphysical terms. On
the great seas of this Earth, “the fields and spacious palaces of my memory,”[3]
I am able to “see the invisible things of God,”[4]
and begin “ascending by steps to him who made me.”[5] Going to sea is thus a mystical experience,
an opportunity to commune with the Deity through the medium of his Creation in
its most pristine and unspoiled state.
The seemingly aimless and random musings of my idle mind on the sea—“without
logical sequence”—also lead me to the Divine.
The mystique of the sea, then, like the constancy of the North Star,
unfailingly provides the direction to the Summit of all human aspiration.
While my seafaring youth is now long
past, my memory preserves it and reminds me of my great good fortune in having
gone to sea all those years ago. The
experience of traveling by sea to distant countries and continents, to go where
and how the typical tourist does not, to experience peoples, cultures, and
languages vastly different from my own, and most significantly of all, to actually
live on the sea and commune with it and practically be a part of it for
extended periods, is to be educated and edified in the most sublime way
possible. It is an ineffable
experience. Fellow merchant seamen would
naturally understand, but to the layman it remains incomprehensibly and
immutably foreign.
[1] Margaret Drabble, ed., The Oxford Companion to English Literature,
fifth edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 944.
[2] Ibid.
[3] St. Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine, tr.
Msgr. John K. Ryan, Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1960, p. 236 (X:viii:xii).
[4] Op. cit., p. 235
(X:vi:x).
[5] Op. cit., p. 236
(X:viii:xii).
