Frosted Glass Between Rain And Life

Queen of hearts, bows to the fools parade, insanity is a strange thing to take comfort in. ‘Mere blood and bone’ will lure you to depths of life/hell which human hand (only) must (only) touch. Vega of the lyre and bellatrix of the Orion in a dance of lights and life, bitterness sings a frayed melody to the hearthstone, listen to her woebegone voice in the soft refrain, fold away your letters and give away your life, for its not sadness but despair that requests it. Believe in phantoms, and one as old as yourself wants to touch your windows and watch its fragile hands pass through the glass. 

The distance between us and the stars

Stardust, (2007) / Lady Windermere’s Fan, Oscar Wilde / Starry Night Over the Rhone, Vincent Van Gogh/ War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude/ Great Expectations, Charles Dickens/ Starry Night, Edvard Munch / Stars, Mary Oliver / Never Alone (an Expressionist interpretation of Starry Night), Mas.s 

Please make a post about the story of the RMS Carpathia, because it's something that's almost beyond belief and more people should know about it.

Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.

(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)

Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.

All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.

I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.

Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.

And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.

Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.

I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.

Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.

No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a respondibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.

They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.

This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.

In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.

At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.

I think the least we can do is remember them for it.

“Dreams of a furnace, the warmth of the ember flickering upon the brick wall covered in the scrawls of innocent childhood, heavy clouds spread over the evening fading away into twilight, the eternal impermanence of the gently touching darkness and light surrounded the townhouse, awaiting the shrill shattering of the heart - held together and wrenched apart - by the forsaken ties of lost loves. will not a shard of glass pierce the trembling heart and end its agony, once and for all? And in the indifference of the glowering sky laid the ruin of kingdoms gone and kingdoms to come. The nymphs of wind care not about your sorrow, the angel of death and the moon kissed and parted last before the beginning of eternity. Run vainly to language and lay your wasted hands and tear stained face upon her breast, and spare nature her indifference.”

What more foolish than to believe happiness is the ultimate ambition of a society whose very foundation is built upon a thwarted craving for meaning and its pillars insatisfaction ? Unhappiness and insufficiency are the driving forces behind economic expansion. The horror of contentment, the very notion of it is injurious to capitalism. So, in a way, a constant search for and accumulation of wealth is equated with success and to not deliriously overwork oneself in the name of ambition becomes failure, or as an excellently absurd term puts it ‘wasted potential’. Perhaps the implication here that any ability to create or produce is disqualified to be of any value unless it is yielded in a way enabling it to be monetised is collectively unacknowledged by society, or consciously endorsed. A bit of prodding into this brings one to the despaired question. What indeed is humankind’s core want? Or in other words, what would compel a thinking person to serve bureaucracy if their fundamental need were met and a decent standard of living provided?

Also another thing that bothers me is the quasi-philosophical belief that suffering is somehow superior to happiness in both meaning and virtue. The dreadfulness of pain masquerades as intellectualism and, to borrow a phrase from LeGuin, the banality of evil is wrapped up in folds of mystery. The ideology that ‘suffering should be endured for the potential of a reward later’ (and not to seek any meaning in itself, which, although questionable is a manifold better reason to engage in masochism) is one that is encouraged and spread by those in power. This is an abuse of religion and an exploitation of people’s values done more or less solely for the purpose of keeping people perceived beneath them in check. This state of affairs is more prevalent than it appears to be at first glance and is a disgrace to the few who actually work for the welfare of people. This has been a rant. Thank you.

today has been very pleasant

have you ever had a friend, like as in a normal friendship? ever?

Journal entries

25th June,

Pardon the hand that once wrote with astonishing impudence that sunsets were better than sunrises. I had woken early this morning with the sole purpose of watching the sun rise and stumbled drowsily up to the terrace, expecting a glaring orb of sunflower tints, but was pleasantly surprised when a golden and blue frenzy of cloud met my gaze. I caught my breath and spun around, inhaling all the delightful freshness of the dawn. The sky was entirely covered in a single expanse of white cloud, breaking away here and there to reveal some soft lavender or violent cobalt. I strolled over to a ledge and seated myself upon it, my foot dangling a few foot above the ground, preparing to lose myself in a reverie. The place where the mountains usually were was shrouded in a fog so thick that the only things visible were the glistening peaks of the far off valley. I found myself thinking of the sea, for the entire thing seemed to be an elaborate imitation of the ocean. In the indented wave of the soft white cloud, in the unpredictable changes of tint, in the light twinkling upon the slim corners of a half broken drift, in the glints of the half risen sun from behind a pale golden shroud, every where I turned, there it was. And the sun ascended leisurely, flooding the mist covered valley with a light that transformed the whole range into a dreamy golden harbour. I have fallen in love with gold, not the crude yellow of the metal, but this intoxicating hue which has now adorned the sky with its gorgeous shades. And so the prodigal son has returned, I whispered under my breath, as my eyes traced the path of a swallow across the scene. I looked at the sun until tears started to my eyes and I could no longer bear the scorching intensity of her gaze, whereupon an old friend of the squirrel tribe wandered across to say good morning and all was forgotten and I now sit here, as a cool breeze blows, twirling a loose strand of hair and writing.

Charles Wright, Nine-Panel Yaak River Screen