Pondicherry, 17.april.99

Tonight the sea shows no anger.  Divested of the wrenching grip of the
moon, that gibbous bulb which in the humility of waning lurks indolent and
scheming between curtain ripples of stratus grey and casts directed
reminder-bands of glow as though in slinking warning of greater times to
come, the parallel-flat curve of expansive Bengali has too become
attenuated, a mere echo of the thrash and wrath is suffered itself to
become only a few nights before.  Yet it shows its emotion, deeper feeling
than its own depths even know, not resentment, but something rich and
noble, a striving-toward, toward perhaps the churning and tempestuous
violence which is its most obvious vent, or perhaps - perhaps - only
toward, toward purely and toward without aim.  For despite its relative
mellow, it will not fully acquiesce to inert placidity, to thoughtful and
meditative inactivity, but must continue to struggle, to gather its
diminished forces from the dimming distance, to array them into battle
lines which it throws against the sharp rocks, heaping one upon the other,
maybe struggling to escape itself, maybe struggling to expand itself, but
struggling, with calm unconscious determination, against and within its
own vast bed which it can never leave, a soft and rocky coffin from which
it can never rise but in protest and then subside, recollect and redeploy,
without anger, with only will, and never with any lasting triumph.  I do
not envy it.  Like an indomitable child who, beyond its sprit finds
himself in the grasp of unintelligible powers, who can only lash against,
but never control, not even touch, nor even interest, his superiors, the
sea has no alternative, can only churn its own rabid froth back into its
mouth to taste its bitter salt like frustrated tears, can only muddy its
own palace floors with continuous and fruitless flailing, can only throw
itself again, and again, with the illuminated stucco bands of deckled
surface blade its defiant armor against its plight, into the crenellated
spears and walls of its utterly indifferent boundary.  But as the child
struggles all the harder when it feels its indecipherable bonds tighten,
so the sea tonight, under the plotting and scrofulous impotence of the
descending and weakening moon, wages its battle without anger, but with
resignation, a discipline, a deep and unsettled discomfort, or insecurity
born of forced servitude to a power it can never know but which I can only
believe it knows is watching, hauntingly, from behind the corner of a
ribbed cloak of faraway mist.  No, I do not envy the sea.  Even in its
vast potence, its incalculable might, it is the inadvertent slave,
reacting to, never benefiting, its uninterested master, a population far
greater than the lord who must be obeyed, a great and neglected servant
demoted to rambunctious supplication through its own inconstant
composition, the ascendancy of stable mass over spurious liquid body,
which turbid and turgid can slosh in horror and mortification, can mass
its forces in thoughtless omnidirected misdirection, but can never
prevail, and never even realizing the predicament of its master, also a
slave in its locked and rigid orbit, also exerting ever force at its
disposal in any direction it can find.  Both pathetic in their ignorant
impotence, their unconscious symbio-brotherhood, their respective powers
waning even now, yet to remain unfulfilled throughout their cycles from
zenith to nadir, each a victim, each an antagonist, the one ever calm and
quiet, and the other bumptious, fractious, assertive, with neither anger
nor goal, but merely a susurrous gnashing battle cry in a war waged with
self, against the odds, against the rocks, with all the detached fervor of
an immortal ill at ease, who without this eternal conflict would have even
less, against which it would no doubt struggle even harder.  We come from,
we return to, we are, the sea, in constant struggle against the great
powers we cannot knowÉ yet I donÕt envy it.  IÕm only glad that itÕs not
angry tonight.