"nude we would caper then, eyes downwards, fascinated by the pornography of our disembodiment, as if beneath a leafy heaven and the limbs of lounging gods…"
Someone may be making a movie of Stanley Crawford’s Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine! Here’s Chapter VII:
VII
When was that morning I was out on the stern deck hanging up the wash on the line that ran from the distillation plant to the flagpole and back, thinking it no doubt not long enough to hold the huge basketful at my feet? When? Lost in futile reveries of far lands and times which seemed then more and more like erroneous transmissions from other lives, not mine, not of my time; and more so now. No matter when. All I know, it had been a long and exhausting decade. A wind had come up, a fitful thing that blew hard and then suddenly dropped, and there I was grappling with wet laundry as it flopped about and would not stay pinned to the line, and wondering what would blow off first into the sea, overalls, underwear, socks, or the whole line. I was bending over the basket when to my back a gust of wind blew open the stern door with a clatter. From inside the pilot-house there came a panicked shout from Unguentine. I raised my head. Drifting out of the doorway and tossed and turned up over my head by the wind, there sailed a large sheet of paper. In the nick of time I stretched to tiptoes and plucked it from the air. There were inscriptions, marks. I smoothed it out against a bulkhead. It was one of Unguentine’s maps. I had never looked so close up at one before. Fascinated, I let my eyes swim all over the bright mass of colour which depicted some hemisphere or other and which was scribbled with indications of sea-currents and trade winds and storm centers and mean annual temperatures, reefs, shoals, shallows. From the long hours I had seen him poring over them, I gathered that he was reworking them for precision and accuracy. A nice piece of draftsmanship, I thought. Some suitable, mellow hour, I would remind myself to compliment him. Then I realized there was something different about this map, something missing: it was land. There was not a scrap of land anywhere on it. Utterly bald. I gaped. Only water over all this quarter or half a globe? What? How? But soon he was at my side humming. Gently teasing the paper from my wet fingers. I let it go. The slam of the stern pilot-house door as he went back inside. So that was the way things were, I thought, and set about walking up and down the narrow walkways of the barge, snapping off a sprig of mint to press to my nose, pausing now and then before the long lists of nautical terms Unguentine had posted here and there for my instruction, in his concern that I use the right vocabulary while at sea. I memorized the lists, but to no effect. I had no one to talk to. Unguentine’s notes were terse, less than a dozen words each. It had been years since we had sighted another ship whole and intact, with living people on the decks, and I could no longer climb the dome and hang out great banners proclaiming certain unfortunate aspects of our marriage, inviting relief, rescue, consolation. Once I wrote a long letter to an old friend, tied it to the feet of one of our pigeons which I secretly dispatched in a midnight gale; next day I found Unguentine silently reading the letter in the pilot-house, his only comment being a grunt, the crackling sound of it being folded up, handed back. So I went on with my chores. What else could I do?
Little, for life on our barge was not conducive to much more than just keeping it going, watering the plants and sailing on from climate to climate, and though there were times when I might wish for it all to sink with a muddy gurgle, there were also others, timeless, without cages, with only leaves and blooms and a silent man. From atop the dome whose prisms I daily polished the gardens were beautiful beyond any memory I might some day have of them. In the very center of the barge, Unguentine’s forty trees with an inner circle of evergreens, cool, dark, unchanging, and surrounded by a flowing ring of deciduous trees, the rounded and drooping boughs of sycamores, elms, oaks, horse-chestnuts, a beech with a white trunk, a red maple, a weeping willow and others whose leaves flashed from hue to hue several times a year. Beneath them, ferns and mosses and an assortment of tropical plants accustomed to a sunless housing, with freshwater ponds here and there with lotuses, water-lilies, watercress, cattails, and bright fresh-water fish, descendants of those netted from the mouth of a great tropical river we once sailed across. At night when all was illuminated by the powerful floodlights Unguentine had salvaged from an abandoned dredge, the dome as seen from inside reflected the gardens in its five hundred panes and faceted and rearranged all the leaves and flowers into patterns of nameless intricacy, kaleidoscopic. Nude we would caper then, eyes downwards, fascinated by the pornography of our disembodiment, as if beneath a leafy heaven and the limbs of lounging gods, as it used to be all painted.
the evening redness in the west 