Mare Incognita

The cabin boy admired the captain.  His immaculate uniform suited his impassiveness. Innocence has something inhuman, the boy thought.

There was a story going around, in which was told that the captain had chosen the sea because of an unrequited love. A woman told him that his naivety was a pose that had to mask his numbness.

The boy dreamed once that this woman was standing next to his bed. She looked at him worriedly and her hand stroked his cheek for a moment. She did not wake him up.

He did not tolerate himself. He wanted to put his life in the service of others.

On his way to the harbour he saw the wind yanking the trees. The wind tries to convince them of something that is not possible, he thought. It was autumn. Green is the color of disappearing.

Why has God not created a domain as vast as the earth for every human being?

When the captain speaks, the boy listens.

The endless sea is a concept that has been familiar to us for centuries. For thousands of years  the world was bordered by waterfalls.  At the edge the water plunges down, sailors feared  that place, that moment.

Skipper’s delusion was a common known disorder.  Sailors, who thought there were seas where there were none. Those wretched and godless souls, the captain added. They opted for a renegade course.

The bow of the boat turned, to ‘mare incognita’, seas that had not yet been charted.  Seas, undiscovered, invisible, illegible and unintelligible. The ship's logs bear witness to hallucinations and visions, the captain said.

The seaman in the crow's nest called out  to the crew on deck : the end at the horizon! Soon the ship entered a kind of fog.  It were the mists rising from the base of the fall. The captain looks over his maps. With his navigational instruments he reaches  the conclusion that these waves do not exist. The ship is navigating coordinates, which have not been calculated so far.

The ship is floating on air, he said.  The wind in the sails made it move faster, faster.

No one returns from such a voyage because such seas are not of water, they are of time.

The cabin boy climbs into the ropes. He wonders if there are others up and about, besides the wind and himself. The ripples of time. All he could see.  

(image Vija Celmins, Untitle, 1970, lithograph, Collection Museum of Modern Art, New York)