Hilton Head Island: le vent nous portera and a poem

 

You have seen variations on this image before.  It is a beautifully frequent part of my life.  Not entirely by chance,

This evening Carol and I watched about half of HAMNET, an original version of the young Shakespeare’s life, before she retired to the bedroom and I came to the screened porch to enjoy the beauty and sip Tasmanian Pure vodka and listen to music and bird calls.  An app I have identifies the bird as a Carolina Wren.  He or she is heard but not seen.

The music at the moment comes from the woman on the screen of my iPad Pro, Margarita Pirri who is singing ‘Le Vent Nous Portera’ which translates as ‘the wind carries us’, as indeed it does.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyzBuo53u_0

I very much like the song and the video.

In one of the scenes young men going off in a train to fight in WW2 are smiling and holding young woman against them.  When I see such images I wonder, as I do of those of the young Germans smiling as they marched into Poland in September 1939, how many were still alive six years later.  

I pause.  It is completely still and calm.  The Spanish Moss hangs motionless as the light lingers to the west over Pickney Island after the set has sun.

I am preparing to sail for a few days or weeks offshore.

I have not sailed in many months and GANNET is no longer always ready to go to sea as for many years she was.  

I biked down this morning and took inventory of food and clothes and equipment and found, among other things, that I had only one working headlamp on board and it needed charging.  The others had died.  I brought it up to charge and ordered two more from Amazon.

I will sail as has become my custom to no where in particular.  How far and how long will depend on the weather and my enjoyment of the experience.  I may briefly touch, but do not expect to enter the monastery of the sea.  I may never again.

I have been working a few hours each morning on GANNET.  Routine cosmetic work.  She needs more, but that will have to wait until I return from the ocean and until I finish GANNET 6.  I only do one thing at a time.  That is called focus.  Carol and another sailer have been proofreading the manuscript.  Both are almost done and when I return I will incorporate their corrections and go over the manuscript myself one more time.

As some of you know I have written that the defining responsibility of the artist is to go beyond the edge of human experience and send back reports.  Not only have I defined that as well as anyone ever has, I have lived it.  GANNET 6 is almost certainly my last long report.  I do not expect it will be much read.   No scout is responsible that his reports be read by headquarters.  He has no control of that.  Only that he go beyond the lines and report truly.  There is satisfaction in knowing that I have.

I hear a motor in the distance. I think it is on land.

I will resume listening to ‘Le Vent Nous Portera’.

And from theTenth Canto or Lord Byron’s DON JUAN.