Futility

Is the name of the game, this game, the game of trying to put into words what can only be experienced in life. James Joyce said that "the fall" came not when Eve ate the forbidden fruit but when humans began to use language. When we began to use more than simple grunts of effort and groans of pleasure. That is when we limited ourselves. Lately I have been feeling very limited by language and my human ability to express.

We sailed away from Puerto Williams almost a month ago now with snow and gale force winds. Our motor died and we had to find an anchorage in the dark...
We have traversed canals, the massive Darwin range of Tierra del Fuego looming all around us, white and blue. Sneaking into a protected by we have struck ice, of the many chunks that had calved off of a glacier right in front of us that ran into the sea. Glaciers that flow and cling off mountains and pour off of the humpbacked hills and mountains, snowy peaks that feel dipped in frost, dusted. A land, this land that has scared spectres and ghosts for thousands of years so that the only thing that remains is the wind, the scraping bare, horrible, lifegiving wind that twists trees and gnarls branches. And water a bed of water, a bed of fresh sweet liquid that permanently pours off of the faces of green metre-thick moss and delicate flowers, sweating rocks and horrible faces.

Instead of writing all my diary entries which could prove to be very tedious for the both of us, I will instead post some of my poetry and maybe a few "extraordinary" experiences (as if not all else is also extraordinary!)
Mostly what is fresh:
May 11
... Today we left Puerto Tamar, the western end of the Magellan strait, rounded the cape of Tamar into the huge mouth, open to the massive poorly named Pacific. What we experience was a dreamy sun, and dreamy rocks, hard as the sea and the wind, the angelic sun cutting luminescent coins from the glowing black clouds. All these words are just words. they cannot ever paint the gold on the water like shards of stainedglass or broken ice on the mountains of rolling water, folding into themselves and into the sweating rocks that hump the horizon and trace their green veins and capillieries from a celestial blue and black to the forever grey ocean...
We sailed all day at 5kts and when the wind began to die, fade fast into the endless brine and be sucked up in the calm swell... at this moment we were doing 2kts...but within 5 minutes the water was black with wind shadowing the exploding sun. White conches broke the dark water with heaven , with white. A forest of surrenders, white flags. We bore off and reached in 30kts of wind, with one reef in the mainsail and a reduced genoa until the mouth of the Smyth Canal where we found a land of enchanted orange flowers growing on meters of soft moss and a thousand homeless rocks. we squeezed into bays where we broke the obscure mirror sending our wake to the edge, fast, feet away by the draped stones, draped in green and turquoise grey full of twisted branches beaten for thousands of years by the real winds these jets that buffet everywhere always forever.
Ah, and all under a yellow hue, in a world squeezed from a tired lemon and left to glow, black and yellow quiet and full of trolls and one eyed unicors and the wet dark smell of moss. All that was left for us was everything in the world, the sunset painted on the first clear sky in weeks and cypress silloittes creeping out of the whispery quiet walls around our anchorage.

...
The next day we reached with only our staysail in 30-40kts gusting over 50 at 5-7kts and only went twelve miles when the wind shifted against us we pulled in and anchored.
...
The next day...views have been spectacular. the sun made vegetation very green, vibrant instead of the customary dull green. And the afternoon lifght was almost pink. We saw another whale that lumbered on majestically down the channel. Tere is something honouring and awe inspiring about being in the presence of such a beast! As usual, light and its absence makes the difference. Weather, clouds and precipitation mix with light and dark and the result is a cosmos of contrast and sweeping colours. Going through Paso Victoria we looked back at Seno Union, a spectacular mix of mountian silouetted land falling into the misty yellow light pouring out of a hole in the clouds... And then dolphins. We saw them in the distance on our port side so we rushed up to the bow and I stood on the prow right on the anchor hanging my body over the rail. But the dolphins, 3 of them, waited up, they could hear if not feel our escitement. They swam, crossing and twisting, sinchronizing and braiding their lightning paths in the bowwave. We yelled and called in excitement. they got ahead and doubled back to play in the bow wave again. They did this for probably ten minutes...

The following poem was inspired by my diary entry from may 11... thats why there are so many similarities...

The Beginning

You win this one

My bare teeth are
Pointing to the sky
And into the rascally rollers

Lines that are circles
Pry my awe, they pry my jaw.
You terrible bed of undulating shards!
You cracking beasts of lore!

No, no.
I win this run,
The cutout cloud prints sliced by the sun

Mountain jaws, the bareback humpback rotten hills
A bird, a kelp gull
Basks in the endless zephyrs til a downdraft
Flaps its wings.
Careen, float, in and out
With your brazen beak
Your weightless curves, searching
With beady eyes the fish famished waves
For a feed -
Goodbye gull! Goodbye you lonely floater!
I will never see you again -
Into the trough
And over a salty crest that saws the sky.

Horizon? Horizon?
I must have coughed or choked
On my own surprise.
Waves to slow my blood, accelerate the heart,
Explode into the sky by the tower...

A tower! A tower!
A howling sillouette, a plaster
Sculpture that becons the birds
And the brimming well of brandishing swords,
A beacon to boats,
A harlot of the standing silent swell

The answer comes to me:
This unicorn and this lemon sky;
These pink bells and 442
Different colours that whisper to me
From sponges, from river corners.

Twinkling dewy mosses
Drip with imagination and slimy lichen,
Protective rusts in the rotten childhood hideaways,
Laberynths of humanless fairytales,
Sopping twisted trees and green,
Green, green, green!

To me, into my wiley world
Of moss and stone
It is not a game!
This is not a game!

Untitled
I

I want to be where
Nobody sees me
Where I fly beneath senses
And everyone is muted
By grandeur.

Domes loom, domes punch the sky;
Rocks fragment the clouds and
Only rusty greens
Crawl up the granites, rusty capillieries
On the glowing, shining stones -

Shine on you wet rocks, where
Veins of minute crystals vapourize
Like a misty spectre

A spectre? A ghost? A phantom? No!
No spirits fly these winds,
Only mist and brine
Because the wind has haunted these rocks
And they never wanted, never loved,
Just blown away and lonely in the echoes.

II

Don´t be afraid grey lines,
I will remain here forever to see you ,
Even if every whisper says im dead
And the rain and the sparrows and gulls ignore me
I shall stay to watch all your shades
From which your tears pour onto the frost
Like morning petals.

Don´t worry grey lines,
You will never be forgotten,
Even if its only my humid bones
Where you engraved your name
Every second for months
And the blubbery backs of whales.

I feel your pulse
From this shell that bobs
Up and up and screams through
Cables and cuts through like knives and butter
Past the penguins and the seals.


Puerto Williams

There are little pebbles, echoes of a stone
That wait eternities or seconds for the sun to loosen
Rivers in the mountains,
For a trip to the sea, a one way ticket
To a channel that leads nowhere;

The grey street water
Feeds children´s breath for as long as
We can remember - as long as houses and
Planes last at the end of the earth
And the crumbling white mountains and the dogs.

A clown show and a circus of wild men
A clanging of metal and dacron in the wind,
A rumbling of engines, a gurgling of water
And a short everlasting snow in the sunchilled -
A goodbye under a bright black sky that
Sears the sea with white flecks and whips it
In our way