Fo'castle Waltz

There have been marvelous heavens and hells painted and written about with completely convincing angels and demons by artists who never traveled further away from their mother's natal bed than the equivalent distance to Montauk Point, Long Island. Would you dispute and investigate their rendition of the demons—provide proof then—What hell do you know? I've seen paintings and read accounts of official artists who worked on the scenes of momentous battles, recorded on-the-spot interpretations of earthquakes, tornados, holocausts, and other natural catastrophes and phenomena, and I've seen the drawings of lovers as they dallied and scribbled their passionate concept of their love's charms. They're all of one piece— trite, dry, and lifeless.

Of the latter—Renoir's luscious female nudes painted with a brush tied to his hand when he had reached a cool eighty establishes the fact that a love adventure isn't necessary to bear passionate fruit—it's a cool, reasoned aesthetic logic that produced his burning canvases. And it was the same cool logic that carved the heart-rending crucifixions and pietas of the early Gothic—not religious fervor.

War, pestilence, starvation, violent struggle, and like subject matter need not necessarily be endured before an artist interprets his aesthetic reaction or expression in his chosen medium, or for argument's sake—any more than this, this sitting on a couple of bundles of tarpaulin locked (though loosely) in irons in the brig aboard that tub the S.S. Hermanita. And besides that, I was getting a headache.

The sun beating down on that iron deck overhead and shooting the glare of its full rays through the porthole—my flaunted southern exposure—had baked that cabin hot; that, along with the fumes of paint from one of those leaky cans, mixed with what had been a sweet smell of hemp from the hawser, was building up one of those skull splitters I sometimes get. Then, too, since I'd fought for the liberty of smoking and singing, I had chain-smoked myself groggy. I didn't sing. Anyone out on deck would have thought I'd gone stir-nutty from that half-hour of solitary confinement if I let out with a few ringing solos. And I didn't feel like singing. My head was throbbing.

The book I'd grabbed from my locker was Emerson's Essays—Second Series. I hadn't intended to take that; it was the First Series which included the cool bloodless dissertation named, with simple dignity, "Heroism," I wanted to read as I sat in chains bowed down but unbroken. Perhaps the profundities that Plato put into the mouth of Socrates in the Apology would have been more fitting. Incidentally, it's not commonly known—and since my readers are a rare and uncommon people I'll tell it: Socrates was also a sculptor, or rather a stone carver, in the studio of Phidias and was fired for shooting off his mouth; and he, too, was in and out of clink a few times before that final nightcap of hemlock—I had precedent. But I'd none of the Dialogues; I had shipped out with only Emerson and Montaigne.

I'd bought those books for ninety cents from one of those lower Fourth Avenue bookstalls—fifty cents for the two Emersons and forty for the Montaigne. I seldom buy books. I usually borrow them, but these were a bargain—particularly that fat Montaigne, even though it was cheaply bound and printed in tiny type—it was a collection of his life's work. A wealth of profundities for forty cents.

My bed of tarpaulin developed lumps. I sat on the paint cans looking out the porthole. There was no one out on the open bridge, and no one on the forward deck. I waited for somebody to come along so I could ask them to get that First Series of Emerson for me. It was cooler sitting there, and as the sun beat down on my hands, I figured out a little project to while away the three days I might spend in the brig before we docked.

I'd let the sun tan my hands and forearms. Then when I was released, which I surely would be by then, if not sooner, I'd have the evidence of this injustice done me stamped on my wrists. Then when Captain Brandt and his damned Swede Mate (and old One-Ton too—he couldn't deny his indirect responsibility) tried to pass this off, I'd push back my cuffs exposing the untanned dead-white rings on my wrists and say, "Gentlemen, can you explain these?"