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Swim To the Bottom and Wait
The Irish are a people steeped in legend. Surrounded by the sea, and so often the inhabitants making their livings from the sea, it's inevitable that legends and myths would grow up around it. Perhaps the most popular is the story of the Aran sweater. The seas in the west of Ireland are notoriously rough, and the fishermen who worked those waters did so in a small leather boat called a curragh, which though incredibly seaworthy would sometimes capsize, throwing the fishermen into the sea. Now fish are ruthless creatures, and generally tend to feed first on the face and extremities of a drowned person. So the legend went, that on the Aran Islands off the coast of county Clare, the women would knit sweaters in a familial pattern, so that their drowned loved ones could be recognized by their clothes.
This is of course just a myth, for the purposes of marketing, invented by one Heinz Kiewe. Ireland feeds on mythology, and there's nothing wrong with myths, though it's always disappointing to find them of a more recent variety, and simply to sell products.
Irish fisherman were known to take a small pot of homemade liquor with them, known as potcheen. Perhaps in respect to the sea, or perhaps just not to be wasteful, when the cork was popped on this jug, it was thrown overboard. The idea was that you never knew when your number would be up, so the pot must be finished before returning to shore, and throwing away the cork ensured that.
It's also said that Irish fishermen never learned to swim. This wasn't as stupid as it sounds. To be thrown overboard in the Atlantic during a storm leaves very little chance of survival. Perhaps you can fight drowning for a while, and if so the cold will take you, slowly immobilizing you till you can no longer kick, no longer swim and exhausted, you sink beneath the waves.
It's said that the wise man swallows a couple of lungs full of sea water and swims to the bottom and waits. For it's not the drowning that's hard, but rather the struggle and panic that precedes it.
In Brittany, there is the legend Ys, a city built below sea level and protected by a dike. Satan, either in his treachery or in some stories, instructed by god stole the keys, opened the flood gates and the city was flooded. Everyone who lived there died, and the souls of the dead children were swallowed by the sea as punishment, for the city had become decadent over time.
The fear of drowning is very real for those of us who live on an island. As a child I once visited Hawaii with my parents. It was the early days of cable television, and the hotel which we stayed offered movies. You could rent a movie and watch it as many times as you wanted for a full day. My parents chose the Poseidon Adventure, not the best movie for people on an island, and as the weather was bad that day, we spent most of it watching the film over and over again. As a result, I've always had a fear of tidal waves.
A few years later on a vacation in Florida, we went to the cinema to see Jaws. The last day there, just up the beach, a fellow had his leg bitten off by a shark. On that same trip we went deep sea fishing, only to be caught on the ocean in a storm. All I could think of at the time was Gilligan's Island ... a three hour tour.
And now I find myself surrounded by the sea, just a few blocks from Long Island Sound. I feel an attraction to the water, and still feel an intense fear of the darkness and depth of the sea. But I know what to do if it swallows me up. Dive in, drink deep, and swim to the bottom and wait.
And the strangles will take me
Down deep in their brine
The mischievous braingels
Down into the endless blue wine
I'll open my head and let out
All of my time
I'd love to go drowning
(From the Ocean Doesn't Want Me Today, lyrics by Tom Waits)aranatlanticBretonBrittanyDrowndrowningfamilyfishermanfishermengodIrishoceanportraitpotcheenSatanself portraitsweaterThe ocean doesn't want me todaytom waitsYs
I was 13 years old when I first heard of the World Trade Center, when a Frenchman by the name of Philippe Petit walked a tightrope which him and a group of confederates had managed to string between the two towers. There are far too few unbelievable and unreal feats in the world, but the sight of a man dancing atop a tightrope a quarter of a mile in the air captured the imagination.
The next time it entered my consciousness was one morning when I got a call that one of the towers had been struck by an airplane and I should turn on the tv. Living in a small midwestern town, I didn't even have cable at the time, and the local PBS station, the only station we could receive was showing children's programming. So for the next few hours I followed the unfolding of the story on the radio, which was a surreal experience of itself, like listening to the broadcasts of the Hindenburgh exploding.
By this time I already knew I was moving, and moving east. In the days that followed I heard a few disturbing statements, some more than others. "Thank god it was only New York City, it might actually be an improvement" was a popular one.
A little known fact ... people in the rest of the country hate New York as much as New York hates the rest of the country.
New York is probably the most egotistical town I've ever known. It's the only place I know that its citizens actually call the center of the world. There's a lot wrong with New York, and perhaps it did need cut down to size, but it didn't deserve that.
And between those comments, and those that we should just nuke every muslim in the world, I soon realized there was only one place I could live, which was of course New York. Now I can't afford to live in New York City, I can't really afford to visit the place and I can barely afford to live on Long Island. But I figured if the place gets hit again, at least some of the cold hearted bastards that didn't mind seeing the place get hit once might think twice if someone they knew lived there.
Sinatra sang "If I can make it there I can make it anywhere." But this isn't Sinatra's New York. Most of us are just trying to hold on. When I was interviewing for jobs here, one fellow asked "How come you're trying to come here when everyone else is trying to leave?" When I told him my reasons he had a simple answer ... "masochist."
Broadway sucks, though I'm not sure if New Yorkers know that yet, as they seem to be in so many cases ignorant of their own history. The center of the world when it comes to music is anywhere but New York. Is there even a center of the art world any longer? And the world champion New York Giants are for the most part a team of players from all over the country who play ball in New Jersey.
The word hero was tossed around a lot in the days after the tragedy. To be a hero just meant being unfortunate enough to show up for work on time that fateful day. And that rubbed me the wrong way. I doubt that given the choice, many of those people would have shown up to work knowing they were going to die. Undoubtedly there were heroes in the midst, an unknown number. But the rank and file casualty wasn't a hero, they were a victim. To be a hero requires intent, not dumb luck.
And it's important to keep reality in mind when thinking of the World Trade Centers. Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people have died in the name of that tragedy, most of which for no other reason than they happen to be born under a ruthless dictator that the powers that be decided needed to come down.
Today the World Trade Center is hole in the ground, the subject of more bickering and debate than went on in planning for the wars which followed. I don't think it takes a stretch of the imagination to see that it was a target because it was a symbol of the greed of America, it's desire to stretch it's arm of commerce into whatever areas of the world it can exploit. If the scene had been any small town in the United states, or a stretch of isolated countryside in Pennsylvania like where the last jet went down that day, the grounds would become sacred. But this is New York, and that's a valuable piece of real estate.
The Trade Center was like Icarus, it reached for the sky and was destroyed by fire from the sky. It was temple built to serve ambition and greed, and those two things tend to lead to hard times. I may be just an ignorant hick from the country, but isn't there a message to be learned here? If you want to see the Trade Centers, turn your face towards the morning sun and close your eyes, and see that little figure high above, walking the tightrope into destiny.
