The sea. I’m starting to catch it now, the smell of it, the pull of it. The sea, the sea. That feeling you get when you walk through cities, settlements, and you’re impatient to leave, can’t wait to see the back of them. You come to farmsteads, villages, you cross fields. Your pace quickens. The last scattered houses fall behind you, and you’re almost running now, hurrying over scrubland, still lugging your life along with you, the big burden, hungry to purge yourself of it, to unclog your soul.
Suddenly a surge of gulls, the sting of salt, and the roar in your ears – and you’re really running now, stumbling over tussock and boulder and beach-grass until you arrive at the sea’s seaweedy edge and see it spread out before you like uncharted existence, unfenced emptiness, and you understand what you’re smelling now, it’s the scent of adventure, the old aroma of the unknown, the unexperienced, the outermost edge of the landsman’s life, and you lose your loamy gravity and grow light, shedding the past as a swimmer peels off his clothes, and out you go . . .
I’ll meet them all there, I expect – Ajax, Agamemnon, the sailor lads that roved with me and lost their lives, our oar-blades an eternal chorus to the ocean, sweeping through the lee-long blue. And when I’m dead at last – and I think now I am – let the flames lick me all over, consuming all, all except this grey old head. Keep that. But take the oar, and carry it to that last country, where I’m lying. You know the place; it’s not far. The oar is the ferryman’s now. Charon, the lone rower. Maybe he’ll hand it to me one last time, and I’ll be one with the gulls again, back with that garrulous old washerwoman, the sea, like Eurycleia, never done scrubbing.
And set the skull at the window, out on the sill, eyeholes to the ocean, where it can collect the lichens, leprous as a stone. And hush then, hush . . . just listen, listen awhile, and you’ll hear what I’m hearing, what the child hears when he puts the shell to his head and the sea talks to him, the whole ocean in one ear, the same old roar, muted for the moment to the soft shoom and sough of the eternal element, deaf wars at either side, Ilium and Odyssey, bone become beach, and deaf seas inside the skull, where the mind once worked, niftily, shiftily, where the brains were, the heroes of the corps.
Penelope's Web Page 61
