Americans,
your President.


claude le monde
UDvCLM
...
archives + shop le monde
guestbook
diaryland
email the claw
...
the last five entries:

i killed it Gilbert

the taco mystique

no networks, no nukes, not notcakes

my vacation in numbers

cycloparappin: CnH4n


how we do:
loupe online
universal donor
tape + solitaire
dr j.j.
tuckova
drunkenbee
my ninjas
dinosaur comics !
the 2ndhand
12% beer


+ you are #




1:08 pm | 24 July 2003 | breakdown: death, the sea, pirates

It should come as no surprise that I tend to hang with morbid folk, the sort who giggle over epitaphs & discuss offhandedly the manner of our own imminent deaths (most desired, most ironically likely, least satisfying, etc.). What is slightly surprising to me, however, is the frequency with which we all think we're gonna drown. When i consider the myriad death options open to us (oh and believe me, I DO), 'drowning' seems to have won disproportionate favour. While drowning is the 3rd major cause of unintentional death in the US, and the 2nd major cause of death for people aged 5-44, American mortality rates put drowning at about 1.5% of ALL deaths (only three deaths PER TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND people--a quarter that of accidental falls, and a tenth that of motor vehicle accidents). Drowning is, relatively speaking, pretty bloody unlikely. You're ten times more likely to get capped in the ass, irregardless of race, than you are to visit Davy Jones's locker*.

But that doesn't assuage the fear, doesn't help shake the belief. Even after doing this research there's still a quiet twinge of but you will drown in me, dear reader. So i think it's more symbolic than actual. Like in Jane Eyre :

��������My eyes were covered and closed: eddying darkness seemed to swim round me, and reflection came in as black and confused a flow. Self-abandoned, relaxed, and effortless, I seemed to have laid me down in the dried-up bed of a great river; I heard a flood loosened in remote mountains, and felt the torrent come: to rise I had no will, to flee I had no strength. I lay faint, longing to be dead. ... it came: in full heavy swing the torrent poured over me. The whole consciousness of my life lorn, my love lost, my hope quenched, my faith death-struck, swayed full and mighty above me in one sullen mass. That bitter hour cannot be described: in truth, "the waters came into my soul; I sank in deep mire: I felt no standing; I came into deep waters; the floods overflowed me."
Or like Pip, the Pequod's overboard cabin-boy in Moby-Dick :
��������The sea had leeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.
It seems like thalassic thanatos ("dread of a sea-death")(heh, check the mad occasional Greek i rock**) is more powerful than most; its symbols are simultaneously heavier and more flexible. Maybe that's why we like pirates: insouciant, fearless, they flaunt our landlubber's dread, living by the seats of their piratical pants, devil-may-care, take-what-you-can-and-never-look-back. They are as close to being part of the ocean as is possible for humans, and the weird tension they have with it (they both love it and respect its power, but they don't fear it--in fact, it's pretty close to an idealized relationship with God if not with our own human counterparts) is perhaps what we envy most.

Where am i going with this? Oh, who knows. Okay. Three points, and then I'm gonna go get some tom yum soup & compose the SHIT outta some memos. First: My social set feels a fond/profound connection with the idea of drowning. Second: I believe this is indicative of an emotional flexibility/psychic availability which leaves them open to certain forms of disaster, attack, or destruction which would feel very much like drowning; indeed, a surplus of sensation, even positive sensation, can feel like being overcome by a flood. Third: Dude pirates are totally sweet and I think part of the reason why relates back to points One and Two.*** Savvy? clm.


*I needed to mention that they are (FINALLY) repouring the concrete of my sidewalk, but in doing so had caution-taped off the entire area, including my front door. When i got home from work last night, the workers presented me with an extremely long two-by-four (okay, i guess it's a two-by-sixteen then) which spans the width from curb to doorstep; this (remarkably unsturdy) board was, then, presented for me like a bootleg red carpet, and as i wobbled up it, packhorsed with Target bags (sixteen giant rolls of toilet paper [guests are imminent], a flat of bottled water, two cases of Diet Coke) it struck me that I WAS ACTUALLY HAVING TO WALK A PLANK IN ORDER TO GET HOME, which was both funny and kind of creepily symbolic, to me, at least, since did that mean or portend that i would have to someday drown in order to "get home"? AUGH. Then i started thinking about how my dog drowned when I was sixteen and, well, the rest of the evening was pretty goth, I have to say.

**DORK

***Although we mustn't forget or discount other pirate attributes and effects that make them OH SO TOTALLY SWEET: friends with parrots/monkeys; get to say/acquire/get "booty" a lot; BARRELS OF RUM; concepts such as "conference calls" and "dental coverage" foreign to them; do not seek to camouflage physical defects or infirmities as Americans do, but rather flaunt them via eyepatches, peglegs, and fearsome nicknames alluding to said deformities, like i could possibly be called MOONFACE LE MONDE or something; MORE BARRELS OF RUM; whores whores whores, and also doxies; only demographic that gets to swashbuckle; get to stand on the poop deck and/or bounty main, both of which sound naughty.


prev... (home) ...next

unless otherwise noted, all work contained herein is � claudia sherman, 2002-04.
all rights, including those of reproduction, reserved.