Here where I sit once again looking easterly to the vast sea, the wind and the waves and winding vistas along the north Atlantic coast drown out trivial thoughts. We are here for a few days to empty our minds of trash, as a vacation should so vacate. Unlike many, we are lucky for this opportunity.
Yesterday, while walking down the far deserted beach, we saw a dark mountainous form high up on a sand dune that perplexed us from a distance. As we closely approached it, we saw it was a massive dead seal that had been washed up with the high tide or had tried to swim to safety. Its rear parts had been ripped apart by a shark, its innards oozing out into the sand. Why the shark hadn’t eaten it, we could only guess. Maybe because even in the animal world where predation rules, de gustibus non est disputandum (in matters of taste, there can be no disputes) applies, and the seal’s taste wasn’t to the shark’s liking. How can we deny sharks a sense of taste when we humans live by proverbs that make no sense; for what else do people argue about if not taste? This has never been truer as the human discriminative faculty of taste (not just through the mouth) has given way to the swallowing of endless streams of digital slop.
I know that most sharks are harmless for humans, having once swam with a nice brown one, although the mass media love to frighten everyone to avoid beaches where they might be eaten by some gargantuan Jaws. In the old days, when I believed danger was everywhere, I used to always wear my football helmet when walking and even tried to buckle up my invisible seatbelt from time to time. But I was older then, I’m younger than that now.
It is the human sharks who swim throughout society’s waters that we should fear.
I was still thinking of that seal today when I placed the remains of my wife’s delicious couscous salad by my chair on the sand where a sea gull swept down and seized a mouthful. When I went to grab the container, the gull shrieked a warning for me to keep back. In my gullibility, I ignored its warning and went to grab the container only to have the gull dive bomb my head, knock my hat off, and try to peck my eyes out. Like the shark and the seal, and despite my hope to vacate my mind of such thoughts, the gull got me thinking about human gullibility and people’s tendency to swallow anything down their ever widening gullets.
Because the sea and sky here are so variable and dramatic, each time I come here I find myself adding to the words and thoughts I have had for more than forty years, as if I am writing a small continuous pamphlet for future meandering minds who come this way not only for suntans or oysters but for drifting on the tides of high and low musings that the place elicits. There is a reason this strip of land has always drawn poets, painters, writers, and dreamers to its shores.
Sixty-five years ago this summer, President John Kennedy signed the bill creating The Cape Cod National Seashore in Massachusetts. It consists of forty miles of immaculate sandy beaches, marshes, ponds, and upland along the Atlantic Ocean, with some portions stretching across the land to Cape Cod Bay in the west.
Henry Thoreau walked this wild Outer Atlantic Beach in 1849. He said you can stand here and look out to sea and “put all America behind” you.
I try to do that as I stand looking at the waves breaking on another foggy early morning. It is best to be alone except for the hundreds of seals moaning on a sand bar and the gulls fishing in the tidal inlet at the far southern end of Coast Guard Light Beach. A few laughing gulls swoop by as if to mock me with their laugh-like calls.
It is very hard to put all America behind you when the fog of endless propaganda wars invades your mind and tries to crush your spirit even when you look away as far as the eye can see.
Across the ocean to the northeast, Mathew Arnold, on a far distant shore in England, wrote his famous poem “Dover Beach” at about the same time that Thoreau was walking where I stand. Two very different men in different worlds, not just one at a window and the other in the blowing wind.
The former was a school inspector whose faith, vague as it was, was falling away as he described in “Dover Beach”: the turbulent ebb and flow of the breaking waves of faith that were being replaced by the sad withdrawing roar of melancholic human misery, devoid of love, light, joy, certitude, or help for pain. It was the rhythmic sound of world weariness and declining faith in the Old World.
The latter, a child of the New World, harsh critic though he was of the resigned lives of quiet desperation many people live and the wars they support, was still a man of deep if unorthodox faith in the divine, telling us that most people are determined not to live by faith if they can help it, as if anyone could live without faith in something, whether that something be God, skepticism, atheism, or the then emerging new god of science. He considered people’s constant distrustful anxiety an incurable disease and he would no doubt consider the current religion of science and digital life a subject for his withering scorn and underappreciated humor.
Try imagining the government telling Thoreau that he had to own a cell phone, use QR codes, get vaccinated, and that he needed a document to travel by stagecoach from his home in Concord to the Cape. It’s impossible. But then I have heard that Thoreau is dead and trying to follow his example is a fool’s journey.
The young rebel Thoreau (he was in his early thirties like Arnold) still held to the conviction that if enough people gave serious attention to the transcendent nature of their natural surroundings and lived by its divine revelations, a new world was possible. But only if they simplified their lives and lived by principles that excluded the mad pursuit of money, slavery, and the worship of the false gods of war. This was eleven years before the American Civil War, which Thoreau didn’t survive.
He died on May 6,1862. His final words were: “Now comes good sailing.”
It is hard to imagine good sailing today as we engage in another American civil war while the failing American empire wages wars around the world that have brought us to the verge of nuclear annihilation.
How can any imagining outdo the absurd reality of Donald Trump? Only Mark Twain or Ambrose Bierce might accomplish that, but alas, they too are long dead and Trump seems to be alive.
Arnold died at age sixty-six of a heart attack while running to catch a train.
Old and new symbols of power marked his and Thoreau’s final journeys: the iron horse and wind-filled sails.
Where Arnold saw a nightmarish illusion in the sea, Thoreau saw wonder and possibility, but not devoid of possible doom. Although often cast as a wild dreamer, Thoreau had his ass planted solidly in plain reality.
“I sat down on the boundless level and enjoyed the solitude, drank it in, the medicine for which I had pined,” wrote Thoreau in Cape Cod. So I followed his lead and sat on a stretch of sand with no human in sight and gazed at the glimmer of a fading moon until I lost my senses. For a few minutes I was gone.
But nature and solitude do not necessarily quiet the mind, and when I returned from my cataleptic state the wind was blowing from the west and the U.S.A. snuck up behind my back. America may be hard to find, but it’s also hard to lose, especially now when electronic spying eyes are everywhere and the news streams from machines everywhere.
Even Henry Adams, the scion of the famous wealthy political family, long ago questioned Americans love of technology and the modern rejection of religious faith. Being an American, Adams knew that technology and gadgets would take preference over the Blessed Virgin and holy spirits when help was needed. In The Education of Henry Adams (1907), he wrote, “On one side, at the Louvre and at Chartres, as he [Adams} knew by the record of work actually done and still before his eyes, was the highest energy ever known to man, the creator of four-fifths of his noblest art, exercising vastly more attraction over the human mind than all the steam-engines and dynamos ever dreamed of; and yet this energy was unknown to the American mind. An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist.”
Gazing out across the vast Atlantic, I wonder if God has a cell phone, and how far does wireless communication extend? I marvel at the way the owners of these devices take for granted the power of this new technology that has “conquered time and space” and redesigned the world and so many minds. Everywhere you go, people hold these little rectangles in front of their faces, repetitively trying in vain to capture something they are not sure of, including their own images. Their connection to these little boxes seems anatomical, and the power they contain almost divine. Even as they walk along this beautiful beach, they are leashed to their dinguses.
America has always taken tragedy lightly. Too busy to stop the activity of their twenty-million-horse-power society, Americans ignore tragic motives that would have overshadowed the Middle Ages; and the world learns to regard assassinations as a form of hysteria, and death as neurosis, to be treated by a rest cure. Three hideous political murders, that would have fattened the Eumenides with horror, have thrown scarcely a shadow on the White House. [my emphasis]
That was Adams again, written in 1902. He knew a spiritual war was coming.
It is hard here on the sands of the Cape not to think of JFK, his brother Bobby, his nephew John, and the CIA’s other victims, especially since President Kennedy saved these sands for posterity, a bit of the USA that remains, if you ever go looking for it. Trump may try to rename or demolish The Kennedy Center, but the sea gulls and seals would never let him him touch this precious gift. Or so I hope.
Thirty-five years ago, Oliver Stone’s movie JFK was sabotaged by the Central Intelligence Agency’s controlled media as a fictional illusion, and its truth is still verboten in the U.S.A.. But Stone was right then and now.
JFK was murdered because he was trying to end the Cold War, eliminate nuclear weapons through negotiations with the Soviet Union, withdraw American military advisers from Vietnam, rein in the CIA, and reduce the power of the military industrial complex. This is why he was killed. These are among what Stone calls “conspiracy facts,” and even as I look out at the wild Atlantic and try “to put America behind” me for a short respite, the wind fills my mind with their contemporary importance.
As I return to myself and my contemplation of the ocean, a lone fisherman approaches and passes me with a nod and a rod. I soon see him disappear around the strand where the inlet flows like a strong river deep into the marshes. Memory tells me Thoreau was right to say that “many men go fishing all their lives without knowing that it is not fish that they are after.”
Thoreau knew he was always obsessively fishing for elusive truth and needed no bait, only his eyes and ears and the deep state he entered when he cast his pencil across the vastness of an empty page.
Many a day JFK looked out upon these waters and saw a vision of a new country he hoped to make real even at the risk of his life. A country devoted to peace, domestic tranquility, and good sailing.
Now we have the obviously criminal Trump, a psychopathic ego maniac, sitting in the White House, and a host of Democratic suitors waiting in the wings with the intention of betraying everything JFK stood for.
It is so beautiful where I sit. The sun is breaking through the fog and blue patches stipple the heavens. Call it dreamy. Here the Nauset Indians fished these waters long before Thoreau. Fishing for them was like the clam shells that litter the beach. It was bifold, providing sustenance for body and soul, and their connection to the Cape’s ecology was sacred. This was long before the profane skepticism and faith in science of Arnold’s mind and times seeped in to poison land, water, and consciousness, not to mention human and animal bodies.
As I recall, “Dover Beach” was composed a few decades after the first generally accepted laboratory synthesis of a naturally occurring organic compound from inorganic materials. Only yesterday I saw many beachgoers spraying themselves with canisters of chemicals that are the offspring of that original synthetic creation that is called urea but which I call piss. I don’t know what the Nausets called it, but I am sure they did what I did as I got up and pissed into the wind and water, hoping it wouldn’t come back to hit me. It was a relief, although my mind kept reeling backwards historically.
The white invaders – they like to be called explorers – led by Captain Thomas Hunt, arrived on the Cape in 1614 and captured seven Nausets together with twenty from the Pawtucket tribe and sold them into slavery. There is so much US history that is hard to stomach, to get down the gullet. Thinking of the slaughter of native peoples from California to the New York island can only make a U.S. American deeply ashamed. When Woody Guthrie composed and sang “This Land Is Your Land,” I hope he had a double entendre in mind, for surely the shore I sit upon is soaked with the blood and tears of many an innocent soul whose land was stolen from them.
It is no exaggeration to say that from the enlarging sandbar the seals’ moans sound like restless ghosts. The wind carries their ancient calls like a Greek chorus above the crashing waves. I feel as though I am attending a sacred rite that is both a funeral, a celebration, and a call to resist. The music haunts me. My mind’s eye ebbs with the receding tide. More sand bars emerge as the sun pierces the fog veiling the water and my mind.
Behind me across the narrow strip of land and Cape Cod Bay lies the city of Boston. It was built to its current renown on the money made by its famous blue blood families through the opium trade that killed so many Chinese in the 19th century. They were money-obsessed, bloodthirsty killers. I don’t think they warned the Chinese that they were being sold a drug pandemic. You have heard their “illustrious” names: Forbes, Cabot, Cushing, Weld, Delano (the grandfather of Franklin Delano Roosevelt) and Perkins. These drug dealers laundered their massive drug profits by giving to Harvard, founding Massachusetts General Hospital, and creating Boston’s renown reputation for culture and education.
First the native Americans and then the Chinese and Vietnamese and Afghanis, et al. – it makes no difference whose blood was shed to create an elegant city upon a hill, a beacon of human benevolence – and to keep it going. The beat goes on. It is a war of drugs, foreign and domestic. It is a world-wide trail of tears
These “illustrious” families were also crucial in the founding of the CIA whose tentacles stretch their banking interests in black operations worldwide. These are the criminals they like to call the Agency whose existence is sustained through drugs and blood and weapons of war. Agents of death.
It is terrible to think such thoughts on this beautiful beach, but my forgettery seems to fail me when the wind is blowing from behind.
The CIA’s war on the Kennedys, and its murder of their leading men, is a multi-faceted operation. Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s alliance with Trump is a testament to the various ways they can kill a man.
Here on the beach the light now seems to be chasing me. I look to my left and see a figure walking my way. It is time for me to leave. I turn and start walking north, back to civilization. Sad but happy.
I hear the laughing gulls and turn to see the seals standing on the waves howling in delight as they clap their flippers in applause. I’m happy to laugh along.
In the distance I see a boat heading for land.
The wind off the water blows this Dylan song into my ears:
Edward Curtin: Sociologist, researcher, poet, essayist, journalist, novelist….writer – beyond a cage of categories. His latest book is AT THE LOST AND FOUND: Personal & Political Dispatches of Resistance and Hope (Clarity Press) website: edwarcurtin.com curtin.substack.com
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