48) I have been adrift, above engine and sail, practicing indifference for the last seventeen days. The boat widely pivots about unseen contorsions of water. Water is everywhere but for a simple line of land I sometimes glimpse, a few lights, when dark. I should have kept my two Knights, so heavy is my solitude, only for a moment to only one more moment. Perhaps another. I have sun so bright it brings to my ocean a kind of fire. I have dark clouds, more commonly. Clouds help me to see into greater depths of this water world. Seems I've a special affinity for birds, they seek me out, they come all the way out here to rest, perched four square against the wind which brought them. I've nothing to offer but my brooding self. Can't imagine what they see in me. Especially after a bad episode which sent them away for a day.
One bird, a gull, was injured. Must have happened along the way, but it fell from the sky onto the deck. I heard it collide while I was within an immense coil of thick rope where I have taken to sleeping. The gull was to its feet at once. Then I could see how slack was its left wing. It hung like the drapes of a whore house, not red drapes but a pure white, a lay of white feathers disordered by the wind. If you know gulls then you know they share a monstrous trait: should one of their kind be hurt in some way others will gather around it in an ever closing circle or noose, to be poetical, and begin pecking at their injured kind. The gull will finally die from this assault, but slowly, over a cruel length of time. I have watched this occur when I was of a more brutish turn of mind, back when I delighted in ugly natural justice. But now that I have also killed my kind, through not fault of my own, and now that I have found the sense of it obscure, even if self serving, I can no longer tolerate pecking or scratching or clawing, biting, crushing, or rasping with a rough tongue, as do the lions, or piercing, sucking or poison spitting, these and many more torments, I can no longer tolerate it among generally similar creatures. All may hunt, all may inflict any grim technique unto a prey's death. I can't care about that or I would be up all night and day of every day, an interfering busybody bringing only starvation. But cruelty, as afore mentioned?... NO! So, when this cracked winged gull fell from the sky, I was waiting in my coil of sea rope to break the circle, as it were. (Listen to me! I am a heap of shit, as it were.) Other gulls began to gather round. One or two made a lazy pass, looking elsewhere, across the bow, behind at a black patty of shit they just let go, or above, should it please the god of birds that it suddenly strikes the busted gull atop its downy skull. Stop! I rise from hiding and heave a ship's tool, a wooden, beautifully lathed thing meant to do something. My aim was precise. I clobbered an offending gull. All others wheeled away, pronto. The panicked noise was first pleasing to me until I saw the one I hit, too, had suffered a broken wing. Now two birds dragged wings like whores' drapes, not red, but white.
One bird, a gull, was injured. Must have happened along the way, but it fell from the sky onto the deck. I heard it collide while I was within an immense coil of thick rope where I have taken to sleeping. The gull was to its feet at once. Then I could see how slack was its left wing. It hung like the drapes of a whore house, not red drapes but a pure white, a lay of white feathers disordered by the wind. If you know gulls then you know they share a monstrous trait: should one of their kind be hurt in some way others will gather around it in an ever closing circle or noose, to be poetical, and begin pecking at their injured kind. The gull will finally die from this assault, but slowly, over a cruel length of time. I have watched this occur when I was of a more brutish turn of mind, back when I delighted in ugly natural justice. But now that I have also killed my kind, through not fault of my own, and now that I have found the sense of it obscure, even if self serving, I can no longer tolerate pecking or scratching or clawing, biting, crushing, or rasping with a rough tongue, as do the lions, or piercing, sucking or poison spitting, these and many more torments, I can no longer tolerate it among generally similar creatures. All may hunt, all may inflict any grim technique unto a prey's death. I can't care about that or I would be up all night and day of every day, an interfering busybody bringing only starvation. But cruelty, as afore mentioned?... NO! So, when this cracked winged gull fell from the sky, I was waiting in my coil of sea rope to break the circle, as it were. (Listen to me! I am a heap of shit, as it were.) Other gulls began to gather round. One or two made a lazy pass, looking elsewhere, across the bow, behind at a black patty of shit they just let go, or above, should it please the god of birds that it suddenly strikes the busted gull atop its downy skull. Stop! I rise from hiding and heave a ship's tool, a wooden, beautifully lathed thing meant to do something. My aim was precise. I clobbered an offending gull. All others wheeled away, pronto. The panicked noise was first pleasing to me until I saw the one I hit, too, had suffered a broken wing. Now two birds dragged wings like whores' drapes, not red, but white.
posted by KJP at 3:32 PM
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