Tag: literature

Posted in Euphrates Voyage, Saturnius McWhirr stories

Mesopotamia Voyage 3–Osman

Posted on by Dogfish Bay

“What is the greatest virtue a steam man may have to best fulfill his role?“ The Professor was already going strong before my foot touched the last wrung of the companionway ladder into the engine room.

“I don’t know.”

“A steam man’s greatest virtue is reason and moderation”

“I’m no wiz at math, but that sounds like two virtues to me.”

Budge, unhearing, went on:

“The three essential elements of the steam man’s art is fire, water and air. Only the most equitable balance between them ensures safe operation; and therefore an auspicious outcome to our common endeavor. And what is our common endeavor?”

“To not be blown to smitherines?”

“Yes, for one. And our number one priority.” He went to his blackboard and drew a pyramid.

“The harmonious disposition of the three elements, fire, water and air, is essential for a well-ordered steam engine. These three elements form an equilateral triangle with air at the apex. The dynamic between them produces the miraculous, fourth element, steam.” At the last word, he hit the blackboard so hard the chalk broke. “What would you say is an analogous model in other aspects of life?”

“You have me there Mister Budge.”

“A corresponding relationship exists in the three parts of the human soul: the calculating nature, the spirited nature, and the grasping nature—appetite. Just as the equitable disposition of air, Fire and Water creates the conditions to fuel our ship, so the harmonious accord of the three parts of soul; each doing their part in the appropriate measure and time, ensures the success of our collective enterprise. But it’s essential that all parts be ruled over by the faculty of reason. Disequilibrium among the parts—or elements—would spell disaster.” Here he erased the triangle with a dramatic flourish.

“Mister Spencer, report topside. We are approaching the station. Prepare to take on a passenger.”

I went into the wheelhouse as we neared the wharf. McWhirr said: “He’s a big shot named Osman Hamdi Bey, director of the Imperial Ottoman Museum. Word is, he’s been a royal pain in the arse in getting authorization for the Dig at Nippur—a real stickler for rules. His reputation for obstinacy is well known to the trustees back in Pennsylvania. There’s rumors about an article he wrote to help his buddy and patron, Midhat Pasha, whitewash the Bulgarian Massacre. He probably wants to check us out to make sure we don’t steal the loot.”

I could hear the revulsion in McWhirr’s voice. There’s nothing he abhors more than man’s inhumanity to man. The massacre was a horrible war crime and had liberals in England all worked up; calling for revocation of British support for the Ottoman Empire. But Osman’s spectacular finds in Syria—and securing them for the Ottoman Imperial Museum—had made him famous. It had also made him anathema to the covetous British Museum officials who were incensed that the treasures should be held in the “barbarous” hands of the Turks. So who is to say what was really behind the outrage at Osman’s alleged role as apologist for brutal treatment of the April Revolutionaries by the Ottoman army?

The landing was covered by an absurdly large pile of luggage attended by two Arab porters. Then a tall, lanky guy in a fez walked slowly up the gangplank with the dignified gate of man of affairs. For all his reputation, he wasn’t much to look at. But he was a real professor, not some bargain, boiler room philosopher like our engineer, Thaddeus Budge.

Osman’s effects were loaded by the porters who, as it turned out, were personal assistants accompanying him aboard for the trip to Nippur. They quickly spread their mats under a striped tarpaulin on the foredeck and set to making coffee over a charcoal stove.

“Welcome aboard, Mister Bey.”

“Thank you, but your kind greeting is redundant. Bey actually means “mister.” Nonetheless, it’s a pleasure to finally meet Saturnius McWhirr. I was pleased to hear that the most august, Pennsylvania Museum board has hired you to ensure the safe transport of our precious antiquities.”

“Your fame precedes you as well, sir. But where, if I may be so bold to ask, are we to stow all your gear? Or should we just chuck it all overboard now in the interests of expediency?”

Osman’s eyes glared from behind his prince Nez glasses. Thus began the strange, unlikely relationship of the two most remarkable men I’ve ever known.

Posted in Euphrates Voyage

At Nebuchadnezzar’s Quay

Posted on by Dogfish Bay

The Samamaris was making frightful leeway as we rounded the bend towards our moorings at Nebuchadnezzar’s quay. But it lightened somewhat on our approach and Captain McWhirr eased her up as if it were a Sunday family cruise. The storm, fierce as it had been, died down as quickly as it had risen.

“Make off the bowline to the second bollard Mister Spencer.”

“Easy now professor.”

After making fast and shutting down the boiler, we jumped ashore for a look around. It was an ancient mound—or tell—that slowly sloped down into the depths of the river to form the quay. The lower strata was made of baked mud bricks coated with bitumen, some of which were stamped with the seal of Nebuchadnezzar himself. To the Northwest, the mound rose high against the hot afternoon sun. An Arab Shepard stood gazing down at this apparition of a stern-wheel steamer with a wheelhouse that sat on her deck like a little hat on a frumpy British dowager.

Soon, a short guy in a white suit and pith helmet walked up and made an obsequious bow.

“I am Joesph Cairo of the customs office. Would you be the Captain of the steamer Samaramis?”

“I would.”

“The customs office has impounded your vessel due to a minor technical matter regarding…”

“Bakshish?” interrupted McWhirr.

“I wouldn’t put it so indelicately. But there are certain processing costs incurred by the Museum trustees sponsoring this worthy effort to preserve our priceless treasures for the future edification and enrichment of both of our great nations.“

“For the enrichment of somebody anyway.”

Cairo smiled placidly: “I heard you were a man of few but laconic words, Captain McWhirr. Shall we go to my office? It’s just up the promenade.”

McWhirr is well accustomed to Cairo’s ilk. Recent digs and spectacular finds have brought out sleazy shysters to exploit the ignorance of scholars and archeologists. Especially vulnerable to such scams are the rapture tourists, who seek affirmation of scripture by marking the river’s depths, which— as is prophesied in the Book of Revelations—will dry up as a sign of the end times. The chandler in Bagdad enjoys a brisk trade selling sounding gear to these New Age fundamentalists. But these days, all that’s needed is a pool cue, so they may have a point after all. An inch drop will have them speaking in tongues, talking to lizards and enthralled by the thought of total annihilation of a third of humankind. But we were concerned with more prosaic matters regarding the water’s depth. A blow like we had earlier could drive our shallow draft vessel sideways onto the bank, prey to bandits who roam this desert with impunity.

But events that were to unfold cast a new light on the prophesied end-times, and gave us—if not eternal salvation—a hard-won appreciation for the convoluted twists of fate.

We walked up the towpath—or “promenade” as Cairo so generously called it—and came to the customs house. It was no more than a shack of mud brick and bundles of reeds. A guy in a green visor and sleeve garters sat next to a fake banana plant contemplating a calendar. This month’s model was Theda Bara tricked out as the Goddess of the Underworld. Those dark eyes followed me around the shack; eyes that can go from abject terror to ecstatic elation without so much as a smoke break between takes. We paid the gentlemen who were, after all, only playing their parts in the perpetual exchange of vice and virtue; where everything evens out in the end—more or less.

Later, as I lay on the pilot house bunk listening to the eerie keening of jackels far into the night, I could hear the professor intone:

“He set sail; the father set sail,

Enkei the God of Wisdom set sail for the underworld

……the waters of the sea devoured the bow of his boat like wolves.

The waters of the sea struck the stern like lions.”

I flowed downriver. The bleak boatman had abandoned his tiller, leaving me adrift. But I escaped shipwreck and the scene suddenly changed. I gazed into the blue eyes of the glittering goddess. We embraced and kissed. It was a sweet soul kiss that I could still taste when I woke to McWhirr’s hail.

“All hands on deck!”

McWhirr runs a tight ship, even if it is a mode of propulsion he thinks unseemly for a man of working sail.

O. Handy Bey—Director of the Imperial Ottoman Museum, 1888 CE
Screenshot
Posted in Art, Musings, Uncategorized

The Alchemy of Bird Poop

Posted on by Dogfish Bay

The real mystery does not behave mysteriously, but speaks a secret language.

                                                                       –Carl Gustav Jung20160919_101939.jpg

Bird poop is the Prima Materia of the opus, the alpha and omega of the great work of the philosophers.  Transmuted and transfigured by the alchemical fire in the sealed retort of the adepts, the excretions of our winged brethren reveal the grand pageant of creation on the microcosmic scale.  I shall endeavor to elucidate the arcana of avian excrement and thereby elevate my humble office of brush bearer to that of high art; to seek amid the white glyphs that adorn the docks a sign that might illuminate secrets of a hidden world.20160504_183526

 

Bird poop is the mother of all elements, without beginning, existent from all eternity and mixed with the handful of primal earth Adam brought forth from Eden.  It is found always and everywhere.  It contains the Divine presence in the obdurate whiteness of its adamantine– and often goopy–reality.  It is both the beginning and end of the great work, the primal ooze from which the aspirant takes flight into the rarefied spheres of heavenly gnossis.

This post is the first in a series logging my daily circumambulation, bearing the broom of my high office.  The broom is the emblem of adepts, the standard of those who seek the philosopher’s stone among the crustacean beasties that reign over the intertidal zone.

Posted in Art, Off the Wall, Poulsbo, Uncategorized

Winslow Heat–Flashback

Posted on by Dogfish Bay

So I took the Prince Ivan thoroughfare up the hill to the east of town to where Joel had said E.G’s new developments were. It seems a big mall was in the works and EG, with the backing of some Ohio LLC, was building a pharmaceutical emporium and a corgie day care center. There was a broohaha when local poodle lovers had protested this plan as being discriminatory against their chosen breed, and had filed a complaint with the City to that effect. But the mayor, being a member of the Little Siberia corgie society, set them straight on that score, and the permit had fairly sailed over the desk of her brother Vinnie in the planning department.

I turned onto a gravel road that led north into the woods. A white and yellow building notice was spiked on the wide based of an old-growth cedar. I got out and walked down the road until I saw a short old guy with ruddy complexion being led by, what appeared to be, his grand daughter. After a respectful greeting I asked:

“Did you know this parcel is being developed by a mobster?”

I’ve been told, that for a private eye, I exhibit a marked lack of discretion, and this was not lost on his grand daughter who attended his obvious infirmity with touching solicitude. He hobbled, leered at me with a sideways grin, and said in a thick, southern Italian accent:

“That’s good. It will be protection.”

I got back into the Dart, lit a cigarette, and thought it over. All the seemingly casual series of events now funneled into an inevitable vortex in which the alluring image of Lupe flowed with languid abandon in the smoky arabesques of my square.

I suddenly became quite nervous indeed. For here in this lonely stretch of woods, all the crazy, disconnected events that transpired on the rock added up in a most disconcerting manner. It was as if all the paranoid imaginings of my troubled adolescence had come to realization; and the events of the past week had formed into a clear pattern. Most of all, I saw that no interference in the schemes of real estate speculators to realize a tidy profit would be welcome—especially such interference as might be offered by a simple artist like myself who does detective work as a sideline.

I was having, what we used to call, a flashback, and all these horrid imaginings unfixed my hair and made my heart knock frantically against all the studied uses of cool. The line between real and imagined dangers  becomes very sketchy at times, and steadier mugs than myself have found serious trouble in extravagant delusions and a swell dame in a skin-tight, sequined dress. At such moments it behooves a simple gumshoe like myself to breathe deep, take a powder, and intone the sacred mantra: Fuck that.

Posted in Saturnius McWhirr stories

Old Hand’s Voyage to the Babylonian Theme Park

Posted on by Dogfish Bay

The bewitching breezes wafting from  the intermediate zone that had vexed our northerly course along the bleak, rocky coast gave way to an absolute calm as we stood off the rank harbor of Virtual Babylon.  It was as though the anchorage were under the spell of some vengeful deity that held the stagnant seaport in irons-a fitful sleep of waking dream.

McWhirr called from the wheelhouse:

“All right, Mister Spencer.”

I let go the anchor. The silence was broken by a low rumble as I paid out 3 fathoms of chain into the muddy bottom of Moloch Bay.

After 2 weeks of foul headwinds and devilishly flukey breezes, we were ready to don shore-going rig for a nice row to an ancient, stone pub at the head of a dilapidated wharf to splice, as they say, the proverbial main-brace.

The melancholy treble of a loon-bot echoed over the still anchorage as McWhirr sat in the bows of the skiff brooding upon the lurid, crimson sea. Not wanting to disturb his meditations, I rowed on.

I’d heard Saturnius McWhirr was a pious man of Quaker stock who had fallen into some branch of the Zoroastrian persuasion. Or was it some Sufic offshoot of Shi’ism whose adherents await the 12th Imam’s return and wander the storm-wracked shores of this world seeking some vestige of a golden age–a relic safeguarded from the literalist creed by occult signs that can be decoded only in the secret halls of pure imagination?

Be that as it may, McWhirr gazed into the offing as the violet light of dusk fell over his weathered brow and said:

“I first heard of the Babylonian Theme Park when but a nipper on my grandfather’s knee. He told me of the Neo-Art Exhibition, the wonders of the Pharmaceutical Pavilion and how he touched the robe of the King of Wall-mart. He told me yarns of how it’s foundations had first been laid in the 21st Century by drones captured during the great cyber wars.”

“But,” continued McWhirr with a tone of caution, “he also told a darker tale. He said the streets were paved with sorrow, the walls built with the grief of mothers who toiled over an illusory harvest, it’s ramparts manned by desiccated souls who invested all their goods in the virtual fun-house of Mammon.”

“Yes sir,” I said though, in my green youth, I could scarce fathom the depths of his narration..

We landed the skiff and walked the cobbled street toward the the ancient, stone pub. Soon, my attention was caught by the droning whirr of something hovering overhead.

Could this be one of the fabled harpies that had long plagued unwary mariners who sail these latitudes–these droning machines of evil and ubiquitous surveillance that kill with rockets as well as with the bland, droning sameness that reduces our citizenry to penile servitude to the sexless god of materialism?

McWhirr drew his cutlass and, slashing at the malignant thing,  thundered:

“Get thee hence, instrument of Satan!”

Posted in Uncategorized

Old Reah’s Bulkhead

Posted on by Dogfish Bay

After a day spent prepping decks and bowsprit for paint, I sip a local sauvignon blanc in the wheelhouse and view the harbor scene. Old Don Reah is building another rock wall on his steep bank, setting boulders to shore the hillside against rising seas. While I admire his fortitude, I’d think he would take a break after nearly 90 years labor on life’s rock pile.reah

Old Hand lies becalmed while flotsam and weed drift slowly past the bow. I submit to the pull and creak of time and hear the low moan of the hawsers pulling against the weathered dock. Sometimes the almost human sounds start me from revery.   It’s seems as if they  were made by the phantom pioneers who lie buried in Kane Cemetary near the harbor entrance.

The thought of old age, sickness and death recalls me to particulars—the cerulean sky opens between massed cumulonimbus over Port Madison where  fledgling osprey arc in widening circles ever farther from their nests. Each year there’s a whole new crop of them, crying loud in their voracious flight in search of fleeting fingerling.

I am reading the biography of Thomas Wolfe. I love the extravagant, melodic rants of this failed playwright who, battling editors, critics and the philistine aesthetes of the the 20’s, went on to write one the great novels of the 20th Century: Look Homeward Angel. It is sad he died before he could haul his semi-fictional cast of Gants, Joyner’s or Webbers across the continent to the seaside town of Port Townsend as he planed. He caught pneumonia while crossing the very same Strait of Juan de Fuca Old Hand will navigate early next month.

But mostly, Thomas Wolfe’s work inspires me to write–to dare imagine that, after 63 years traipsing this wide, sad earth, I may actually have something to say.

Some, it seems, are born to write, to perpetrate effusive, yet judiciously restrained prose upon the citizenry of this steamship earth– writing which plumbs the deepest mysteries and gets at the heart of unshakable truth. But I have no pretensions to profundity and aspire only to create sea stories which might weather the deluge of time and stand as true as Reah’s solid bulkhead.