Link of the Day:
locating miramar
I'm just finishing up reading beachcombing at miramar. It's basically one of those pseudo-spiritual "coming to terms with one's life" and learning to "live authentically" memoirs. Never mind why I allow myself to be sucked into books like this and then surface around page 100 gasping for breath and hungry for substance. It happens.
Anyway, around page 90 I started wondering where exactly in California is Miramar anyway? I've driven the entire length of the California coast (in weather so beastly no one back home believed I could possibly have been in California) and have no memory of Miramar. I looked in my library of guidebooks and found only one reference to Miramar - under night life in the Santa Cruz area.
Unwilling to put on shoes to go get the map book out of my car, I hunted down Miramar on the web. The red cross marks the spot, just north of Half Moon Bay - of which I do have a memory. I'd never seen it rain that hard in my life -including Hurricane Carol when I was 2 years old - until the flood last year here. I picture Half Moon Bay as slick and wet and Rt. 92 as sickening curves with giant truck headlights spinning at me out of the inky blackness darker than the dark night of the soul. OK. So I've located Miramar.
by-the-wind sailors
Unable to set a course of their own, they are blown across the wide Pacific, sometimes this way, sometimes that way, depending on the direction of the wind. ... sailing aimlessly in great flotillas, going with the breeze... as they blow with the wind, they are transfigured into people I have known - people who looked as if they knew exactly where they were going. - Richard Bode, beachcombing at miramar
These by-the-wind sailors are a kind of colonial jellyfish. They're made up of individual organisms called persons , differently specialized for catching food, flotation, moving around, reproducing, and whatever all else jellyfish need to do. They have a sail that looks like it's made of purple plastic, which sticks up above the water. They drift in warm water currents and are sometimes blown ashore by the wind. Hence the name.
Bode gets a great deal of mileage out of these jellyfish as a metaphor for the responsible, dutiful, tradition bound people in his life - they are rudderless and unable to alter their course. By page 148 I was ready to throw the book across the room. The image of hordes of seemingly resolute individuals who have in fact "lost their way" rushing about faking it for the world scares me even as I instinctively yelp "what a cliche!" Yeah, yeah, sure this hits home in a way. It's easy to get caught up in tradition and convention and shoulds and oughts and lose touch with your own innermost values and yet seem successful, happy, and purposeful on the outside.
One day a couple years ago when I still worked for Cosmodemonic, I took an early morning walk in Tokyo before a big customer meeting. I passed subway entrances and train stations every one of them spewing forth streams of identically dressed men carrying briefcases, all of them running. They moved like one organism. I didn't want to be them.
OK, by-the-wind sailors and salarymen on their way to work ... a scary lack of control. Yet, I was repelled by Bode's total dismissal of any obligations to his family or society or anything beyond himself . As if to take control of your own life, you have to see only your own life. There's no room in Bode's story for his grown children (he does mention his son briefly in one sequence on fishing - that quintessential father-son thing), a partner, friendships beyond the superficial. All the people he encounters in his beachcombing endeavors seem somehow beneath him - like the jellyfish and the stones and shells - just more beach stuff washed up to teach him some cosmic lesson. Even the love interest who shows up fishing from a pier in chapter 15 is somehow not quite whole, not quite a person in her own right - she is perfect for him because she reflects him. Gag me with a spoon!
destination
A friend inquires in a recent letter if it isn't time to stop "this idleness, this drifting. When will it all end? Where will it all lead?" he wants to know. - Richard Bode, beachcombing at miramar
Whoa! Where have I heard that before?
So is it the salarymen who are drifting or I who am drifting?
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