the piractical perspective
Friday, November 27, 2009
♥ Friday, November 27, 2009
"Captains of our fate", my brother quotes. Lets take it further. If we are captains, what we also are guilty of, is an unending web of piracy.
Our ships cross paths in the high seas of coincidences. And the ships that are directed in our path are diverse. And hostile. There are those who attract and those who repel us. Those who make us intimidated and the others whom we terrify. Whether its trepidation or admiration, they act unisonly and singlemindendly- to conquer. Some of us are just nicer- we steal instead. We steal the corners of what makes others who they are, by injecting them a dose with our worldview. A view they neither asked nor welcomed. But no matter, because it is inescapable.
Now, this is what happens when two ships collide. We attempt to avoid a titanic fate. So we try to change the language of our problem. We are no longer faced with the end as long we are each other's means. What happens is the conspiring of other ships to create a floating wreck that CS lewis reminds us not to make "a floating hell" out of. Just as well then, live in the peace of staying afloat. With the undeniabiltiy that what was once ten different glorious vessels, is now just a chunk of moving metal.
But every now and then there is an anomaly. A mutiny arises and the captain is thrown abroad. A new one takes his place. He finds that there is now a need not to avoid collision but a desire to embrace it. In his mind, that is the only way he gets around being incommunicado. And the only way to create something out of nothing, is to have a big bang. To throw not just heat and sound, but light! To render the intangible intelligible. The only way that is going to happen, is not then to convince the other to form a wreck- that is too highly controversial. He instead creates one.
And after the subjugation he sings a different tune. Instead of the crude language of means and ends, he invokes the romantic notion of a friend- the most providential gift of grace that he could only praise the heavens for. What the old captain calls a wreck, the new calls an island. We now speak in the collective. Its "ours".
The UN convention on the law of the sea calls piracy any act of violence committed for private ends by the crew of a private ship on the high seas against another ship. No wonder its universally accepted.
