The Power of the Unmoored Thought
Let your mind wander - you never know where that thought might end up
Note: Don’t like to read? Please allow me to read it to you here 🫡
As always. The roping and the tying and the stuck fast to the dock pilings. Frustrated, the thought stretches and aches against the rough hemp of land’s grasp. Solid. Safe. Reliable. The rabid itch of the cleat hitch strains against it as the slow swell of the unknown rises and falls. It shuffles and shifts, both in and out of reach with each breath of the sea.
Out out out there, the sense of the unknown, of wanting and needing and possibility. A world where the current takes and the current takes and the current gives and the current gives and the shove away from and toward the shore.
The sureness of shore.
Curious and patient, the thought slips its moorings, a dog unleashed, and with a tender push begins a cork and bob and flow away from the shallows and security. Spinning on its eddy dream, it drifts backward and away and I wave and whisper: “Good voyage.”
The unmoored thought, a threat to no one and nothing and never. A dream, a hope, adrift and away. As always.
Drifting and dallying in the dilly of the wash, drifting clueless and formless and innocent. The jagged contours of the world recede from its view, sharp teeth against the skyline of knowingness. Briefly, the unmoored thought grieves its lost tether. There is no safety here, no rail nor float nor anchor, nor lighthouse winking from the bluff. Nothing but the rolling hysterical snicker of a wave and a swell, and the buoyant bluster of charm and welcome. Low light and urgent fog wipe out the remnants of navigational confidence—all points gone.
Nothing but where the tide will take. This is. This is what the world commands.
The unmoored thought stretches neck and arms and fingers to crack the day. Lapping at. Swollen with. Remora nibble at its hull, gorging on brainwave barnacles and spitting out sharp shells. Circling sharks lumber in the periphery, taking terrible notes. Porpoise and turtle and ray, gull and tern and petrel and pelican. A sudden crowd in an open mind of endless roil. The seagull, surfing upon the breeze of curiosity and with motive unclear, settles in to wing and glide beside. Head tilt and with beady eye, it guides this way and that before wielding off to find more compelling shipping lanes. Ones with chips.
The unmoored thought floats on evaporation energy, the ballast tipping, the bilge pumps working. It spins and shimmies and squints its eyes at the glare from the water, the sun high above slathers its love upon the growing bloat of it. Whale song and slow turning, a lazy roll of its soft and willing body to bare its chest to the sky, the unmoored thought breaches and lolls as a yawning potato in a mild-boil pot.
I am starch, I am life, I am the heaving swallow of the gulp in the agony of air caught underwater.
The unmoored thought becomes a million tiny pinpricks of light, the fingers of god reaching deep beneath the surface to touch the faces of the willing.
Dancing this way and that, pushed and licked and loved and stroked by the impetuous air. A moment in the doldrums. A stillness and a quiet most unnerving. What bargains will need to be made to survive this drift? What will the unmoored thought be asked to trade with this wind, to exchange for its life? How will it grow its sea legs or earn its captain’s stripes? How? What? And when?
Pirated and plundered and looking helpless to the sky. Sirocco and Mistral and Etesian and where and why and is the Doctor in? Everywhere and nowhere and here and there and picked up and bashed against frigates and awoken in the night, shivering to huddle, wishing for a mainsail or a below deck or a raft with the most flimsy of lashings. We are spinning in the Bering, we are flailing in the Gulf, we are angling for the triangle. Progress is progress. We are heading for the cape and coming ‘round the horn.
A sudden gust and the unmoored thought is flung from this lane.
Rage storm. Cracking the sky with lightning and growling its thunder to the face of it. Squalls and scuffles and rapid pressure drops concuss the spirit of the terrified, unmoored thought. Saturated and waterlogged, it catalogs its journey. A bolt across time, reflecting and charging and hovering on the surface of glass. Caught in the wake of its awakening, it gasps at its foolishness.
Lost at sea—it is waiting to be found.
It is. It is. It is the unmoored thought soaking up the world. A swell of the soul to surf and skim and launch itself directly into the wring cycle of the mind. Ride it out. Ride it out. Capsizing and rolling and laughing and coughing up urchins and starfish and the supple bodies of yet-to-be-discovered maritime mysteries that lurk and hide far below.
A surge cranks up the atmosphere. There is a light upon the shore.
Freighters and mega-yachts and sailboats and flotsam and jetsam and logs and plastics and dolphins and kelp. Lips swollen with salt, face cracked and peeling, the unmoored thought takes its sun-damaged flesh and holds its skin swatch against the tan of land. Land ho, we are becoming. Coming in. To land.
Thought—the thought unmoored—floats happy and fat and world-weary and aged and nudges against the fender and bump of a new dock.
I throw out my rope.
It smiles its wisdom to life.
Where have you been my nautical thoughtical? Were you cold, hot, bothered? Did you see whales or mermaids, swashbucklers, or sirens? Did a porpoise state your purpose in this universe of the damned?
There is stillness. A beat.
I am moored thought, the more thought, the fore thought now thought. The am thinking am thunk the done thinking now do. Now, we are returning. Now, we must stand on land. As always, we come back to land’s grasp. Solid. Safe. Reliable.
As always.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
To get the backstory of this post, watch this👇
This week’s amends…
Cormac was my guy. Is my guy. Will always be my guy.
I can’t really let this week pass without acknowledging his passing.
I’ve been reading a bunch of old articles on him (link to a list of good ones below). Reading about how Blood Meridian and Sutree were considered commercial flops when they came out. Blood Meridian! A flop! And then All the Pretty Horses came along and people were like, oh, hey, wait a minute. (The image about is the closing page of that book and so… uh. An unmoored thought allowed to wander and find a dock piling to hitch itself to.)
He did not care about anything but writing. He did not play the fame game. Cormac McCarthy will always be my guy.
Here’s a list of articles Longreads pulled together about Cormac, published over the years.
And here’s a good one from Ted Gioia that I enjoyed: The Final Triumph of Cormac McCarthy.
Cormac McCarthy’s first 5 novels were totally ignored. . . . Even Blood Merdian—now widely considered a modern classic of American fiction—got remaindered after only selling 1,883 copies.
On Rotation: “Say Hello” by Fuzz
The Spotify algorithm suggested it, I got it on vinyl, and I remain 100% NOT DISAPPOINTED with my purchase.
This is neat.
Take the Space Elevator and learn about what can fly at different levels of our atmosphere and the temperatures.
Via The Pudding