a trek

This morning I forced myself to raise at an ungodly hour and watched the waning moon get lost as the sun rose. I trekked down to Moonhole via speed boat with a great friend of mine who has signed up to be a guinea pig for a short experimental video that is currently in production through Tuesday. I don't think she or anyone understands what they are in for, mostly me. I was so afraid of coming home and sitting on my ass and doing nothing, thankfully a few kind souls are still willing to extend themselves beyond belief. I am giving myself these timelines and trusting my body and hoping that something great will come out of these projects, successes are tied closely to failure right now in my life and I have had some pretty massive ups and downs, turning points and burnt some bridges that needed to go up in flames. So i hope I at least learn a lesson or two, actually if that is my goal then i have a long way to go with trusting and understanding how a little patience and persistence really does make things run so much smoother. I am by nature very nervous, anxious and short fused. And after this year in NYC I need to find a way to control it as I loose it a lot, most people I come across in the academic world look at me and say two words, trust and confidence. I also blindly casted my captain/lover/father /masculine energy by the side of the road this morning, he is wild, they call him Bushman. So far my ass is killing me and i napped like a baby from 1-3:30 pm, tomorrow I will collect via boat- Ticky, a tripod, and a cow foot.

ah trying to make it make sense

I come from the West, East, North and South, a combination of light and dark, the triangle finds itself complicated in my blood. Hundreds of years ago my ancestors docked against shores labeled “Paradise”, where the sun always shone a bright gold and burnt my skin red. My mother would insist that I stand still while she untangled the wind and salt from my mane. She silently prayed to the new moon for thick hair four times a year. My sister and I always had the blankest of stares when we were ordered to stand in front of her while she chopped away our girlish tendrils only to reveal horror.

Looking back recalling the intense silence and concentration on her face, her thick fingers that held steadily to the sharp scissors, I often wonder what was racing across her mind on those sad Sunday Evenings. I flinched whenever she reached the corner of my ear dreading that one slip would bring blood. The scent of the sea changing my composition daily and the evening turning a piercing warm before the sun dropped from the horizon, like a heavy globular God, always reminded me of one thing.

The Missing.

The missing had gone to sea; he had gone to leave his trace. Markings that would determine my future, precise incisions made with foresight. The reverberation in my young mind felt like abandon. It felt like we were all strangers. Especially when he came back to throw me in the air, catch and release me, letting us stand on his back while he exuded magical powers underwater naming everything in the ocean for me; fauna, rays and reefs, his lungs expanding and morphing into something beyond human.

Amphibious.

The traces that were left in all the confined spaces of the sea, I carry now with me, unconsciously I move towards the tide in this concrete jungle. Forever bound by the blood that flows in my veins and the words that spill vibrantly full of exaggeration from lips. Memory becomes an unstable concept enabling us to reveal and make experiences more important than they really are. Now all of our lives flow together in fiction, theirs loudly and visible mine entangled, woven and silent.

Repair,
I am making repair.

I am attempting immortalization, the preservation of unreliable moments. I am wondering and wandering, proving and disproving, silently trusting my intuition, that internal compass that directs me, like that incision made so long ago. I am in the midst of endeavoring and perpetuating selfish behavior, to preserve all attempts to free myself from thoughts of expiration.

In Season

"In Season", shot earlier this year in March.

It lead me down a new path that was so much

clearer and succinctly "I".

An update, its comparative piece is now in pre

and production phase simultaneously.

porch

this is my porch.

Ritual

dancing in the moonlight. June 2009

Paget Farm.

01.08.71

A rapid fire knocking pierced my sleep this morning. Jonesy’s face was white if a black man could be white. He told me to come to the bridge. It was around 5:30 am and still inky. December near the equator took some getting used to. The waters were rolling and choppy, the wind cold. I made my way sleepily up the winding unstable stairs to find that Lincoln was sitting alert with his ears peeled and a brimming cup of steaming coffee that was about twenty minutes to hot for consumption. He always mumbled under his breath when he realized his foolishness. My cup was to the left, I walked over to it and sat in my chair and took a swig. I lit a cigarette and pulled myself into consciousness.

I was briefed with correspondence that was coming in sporadically over the last thirty minutes; a ship was going down fast and in my backyard. Shortly after a hissing came from the VHF, the messages came intermittently; a large boat was burning just North of Mustique between the Pillories. We were between Petit Martinique and Canaoun it would take us on a calm day at full speed about an hour. Jonesy and Lincoln looked at me eagerly for some sort of confirmation or an order. I was puzzled by this non-question. Barbados would have to wait.

The engine room thrust us ahead full blast. About 7:30 am the coast of Mustique came into full view. It was a beautiful pristine morning with darkness rising from the center of my vision. An endless cloud of smoke was pouring into the morning sky, flowing out of this immaculate white cruise liner. We dropped anchor behind the Pillories and deployed our life raft. The sea was littered with about thirty life rafts and the land with faces that were curious and animated. Hands waving like frantic flags in a sea of confusion. We pulled up alongside the largest raft and got a layman’s idea of what happened.

She ran into a reef, the fuel tanks exploded, she burnt. Captain Raymond Kerverdo read the ocean depth at 16 meters, my guess is that the maps were drawn up years ago and didn’t take into consideration that shallow areas of this sea behave antagonistic at times. In fact the depth was roughly half, eight meters. She had pushed off out of Margarita, Venezuela nine days before. The dawn of a new year, docked in Trinidad for a night and was heading up to Barbados with her mostly European crew and passengers.

The Caribbean was becoming a magnet for those who could afford it. The crew and I watched as boats from as far away as Martinique came to aid. We hoisted our anchors later that evening after all of the passengers were safe, they had been taken ashore by many saviors of the sea, most of them housed temporarily on Mustique at the Cotton House and the others between Bequia and the mainland.

The Antilles lay twisted on her side, burnt and broken. One thing about sea folk, on God’s water there is this ethos of being equal. Once you are in the vicinity of a disaster of this magnitude you have to force yourself to stop thinking too much about bad luck. In 1958 British aristocrat Colin Tennant had purchased the island of Mustique for a sum of money that is a shame, 45,000 pounds, Princess Margaret famously took up residence. Shortly thereafter the government in its servitude bent over backwards to secure itself in the Commonwealth and under the Queens skirt.

I never really understood why we left that evening so early. I would have loved to stay and watch her melt away. I watched the smoke recede against the horizon as we carried on our way to Barbados. We made it. She never did. I have since developed an obsession about this gentle iron giant resting on the banks of some kind reef. Some days later she was emptied of her brass, a boat going to Guyana was the kind recipient of the treasure. All the china was distributed between the more affluent families of the Grenadines. I would be lying to say that I didn’t have any or that I knew a kind house in Bequia that wasn’t laden with the luxurious “Made in France” platters, plates, glasses and pots.

After inhaling so much smoke from the belly of the ship it will be impossible to forget her, I could not fathom what it would be like to loose one of these gracious beasts to Mother Nature or stupidity. She turned into one of these crazy obsessions that only men with time on their hands would rip apart. Something oddly masochistic about obsessions they deter you and leave you feeing guilty and red faced, a combination of shame and excitement. Locked away from everything that once meant something to me, I started to put her back together, in my own crazy way, starting with her shining bell, the one that Ollivierre managed to steal before the sea called it to its grave. Real brass was just too heavy to swim with in deep water.

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