Reading Day 2
Composition: Ocean resurfaceXK #fiction, #jetsetlife, #ocean, #liquidity, #existentialism
ON THE YACHT Before boarding the yacht, I had pictured the front as the most enjoyable place of a boat. And, ever since Hussein invited me to accompany him and a few of his friends on the yacht, I had pictured myself sitting at the fore, greeting the sea, sensing the wind as if it was the freedom surrounding me. It was a fantasy. Everyone wanders around, every now and then, with utterly silly daydreams of having lives that aren’t theirs, no matter how dreadful or splendid our original lives may be. But in reality I preferred to sit at the stern, at the furthermost end of the yacht, looking at how the horizon swallowed the sea. There, at the furthermost end of my vision, I saw that history, as well as the sea herself, is an ocean. The pasts are depths that stretch down towards the bottom of the beginning. The present is no more and no less than a surface—with it’s complex physics, yet simple actuality of surface tension. Whilst every rainfall and river is a future falling down into it, warping the tension with a constant penetration of presents. And, whatever glimpse we may grasp of the bottom is seen through the mirror of a surface. The focal point of the beginning rests in the parts of the present which we’re not aware of. The surface is inevitable, just like the present is in the act of gazing into the depths of the past. MARILYN I had this picture I saw the other day, in the library of Princess Grace, in my mind. It depicted Marilyn Monroe sitting in a striped bathing suit, reading the colossal Ulysses. The contrast fascinated me: Society’s assumed stupidity of Monroe, against the idea of refinement and education connected to the reading of Ulysses. I said to myself, well that’s an ideal—an educated, slightly sad mermaid. I wanted to embody the picture. I wanted to stage it in order to honor it. I wanted to make all that I saw in the picture exist once more. Maybe it was out of obsession, or maybe it was out of care, but I wanted it to become materialized in my presence. The fore of a yacht would be perfect for this embodiment; transcending the linearity of time in front of an endless field of baby blue, which is how the mediterranean looks from the harbour of Monaco. Maybe all of this came to my mind solely because I already knew, and was thinking quite much about, that I would spend the following week on a royal yacht out on the mediterranean. The tricky thing was
48