Faeries, come take me out of this dull world,
For I would ride with you upon the wind,
Run on the top of the dishevelled tide,
And dance upon the mountains like a flame.
W.B. Yeats, The Land of Heart’s Desire
Rocinante: Sailing the storm outside the Golden Gate Bridge.
Listen, I get it. I fucking GET it.
Here’s some romantic fool naming his sailboat after Don Quixote’s broken-down nag, pointing it straight at a storm outside the Golden Gate like that’s going to mean something. Like the Pacific gives a shit about my Yeats quote or my need for poetry-in-motion or whatever existential itch I’m trying to scratch by scaring myself half to death.
And you know what? Good. GOOD. Because the alternative is what, exactly? Sitting in a climate-controlled box, scrolling through other people’s approximations of living, convincing myself that’s the same thing as actually feeling the universe try to kill me a little bit?
That Yeats line, “take me out of this dull world”, that’s the whole ballgame right there. The dullness isn’t comfort, it’s death. It’s the slow suffocation of doing what I’m supposed to, wanting what I’m supposed to want, feeling what I’m supposed to feel. And somewhere along the way I forgot that being human means occasionally putting myself in the path of something so much bigger than me that it reminds me I’m not the center of the goddamn universe.
The storm doesn’t care about my artistic practice or my Instagram likes or my carefully constructed narrative about seeking adventure. The storm is honest in a way nothing else is anymore. It’ll throw me around, test every decision I made about rigging and ballast and whether I actually know what the hell I’m doing, and maybe, MAYBE, if I’m lucky and the universe is feeling generous, I come out the other side with my boat still floating and my hands raw and my heart actually beating for real instead of just keeping time.
This is the same beautiful stupid human reflex that says “I want to FEEL something, even if, especially if, it hurts.”
The dull world is always there, waiting. Bills and obligations and reasonable decisions. But every now and then you need to dance upon the mountains like a flame, even if you’re just some idiot in a small boat testing my mortality against indifferent weather patterns. That’s not crazy. What’s crazy is thinking comfort is the same as being alive.