The Boatman

Tugging at the threads of half-memories...

[Another of those AI-generated images which took me a while to approximate the idea I had of it. This one comes from the AI engine called Poe, driven by the Quora site, using a tool called Photo_CreateE. The prompt: “a detailed etching in the style of Albrecht Durer of a hooded boatman, and his mysterious passenger, on the River Styx.“ The castle tower was a nice touch, I thought.]

The other day, while working on my review of Jeanette Winterson’s recent — and fabulous — collection of ghost stories, something kept trying to get my attention.

You know how it is:

You get involved in a project (a story, a recipe, whatever) but your mind has all these raggedy bits of half-fastened cellophane tape hanging out around the edges, constantly snagging on stuff not immediately relevant. You learn to ignore them during the assembly stages, and just go back to clean them up before pronouncing The Thing done. The vast majority of these sticky bits end up being snipped off at the base, or perhaps folded into the larger wad of ideas and thoughts. But every now and then, a stray bit drifts to the floor, adhesive-side-up, and waits patiently for you to step on it en route to the next project…

So it was this morning, when the sticky bit in question suddenly asserted its presence, insisting that I not ignore it.

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Some background:

Over at Ye Olde Blog, I do a weekly — every Friday — post which in its general form consists of several quotes from quotable people (poets, gurus, philosophers, etc.). These are all pulled from a single source, the long-running (and anonymous) whiskey river blog, and they tend to trigger related associations, for me, with other things I’ve read (often very recently). So the second, i.e., “not from whiskey river” portion of the Friday posts consists of some of those quotations which I’ve come up with.

Not every week, but often, I find myself wanting to participate in this imagined cocktail-party banter among justifiably more famous writers and thinkers. So I’ll toss in a rumination of my own on whatever the putative theme might be…

And over time — I’ve been doing this now for over 15 years — it started to become obvious that many of my own brief thoughts formed a sort of collection of their own. These interrelated bits seemed to be coalescing around the ideas of memory, the past… nostalgia. So I came up with a title for an imagined collection of them: Maxims for Nostalgists. They generally are maxims, more or less, maybe a few sentences or even paragraphs. But some of them have escaped that narrow framing, and have turned into brief, brief narratives.

That was the sticky bit that kept trying to glue itself to my mind the other day, while thinking (thanks to Jeanette Winterson) of ghosts and of the dead more generally: a stray memory of Maxims for Nostalgist #72:

When the man stepped from the shore of his life into the boat, the hooded boatman asked: Where to?

“Oh, no destination in particular! Maybe we can just sort of sail here and there for a while? Can you do that, or do you — well, you must have other passengers, right?”

I can do that, yes. And yes, you are not my only passenger. It helps to have a separate eternity for each of you.

They sailed for a long, long time, seeing many wonders. Light beyond light dazzled him; music beyond music made him laugh and weep. They visited places that the man had once thought of as galaxies, and other places too small to have interested him at all, and somehow they were all the same size, and equidistant from one another. And they all thrilled the man to his core.

Even so, eventually, he sensed that he had seen enough. He named a destination, and the boatman nodded and leaned into his tiller to set the boat on the new heading.

On this last leg of his journey, the man thought back on what he had always considered to be his life: the people he had known, the places he had lived and those he had wanted to visit, the arguments and love, the heat, the cold, the noise and aromas, the textures, the fantasies, the sunlight and moonbeams. He shook his head, and said to the boatman, “It all… it all seemed so real.”

To the man’s surprise, the boatman sighed. Yes, he said. It did, didn’t it?