WE ARE A VESSEL
Bianca Galvez
We are a vessel, a divine savage of a vessel, propelled across the Atlantic by a sense of duty, a high and eminent sense of duty that has rushed through our veins and our bones, commanding us to bend. We are a vessel descending from the sky, from a higher world, to disembark on the perilous waters of unknown beasts, to subdue them and to master them. Our lateen sails, like fins, cut through a holy firmament piercing the bellies of clouds, gently yet firmly, so that history can remember our nautical and spiritual passage through ravenous waters, through herds of magical sperm whales, through war-bent mermaids, their spears striking our wooden hull. We are a proud vessel. We are nautical lads, half-witted imbeciles, easily captivated by mermaids and their glittering tails, their wooly hair and their wet limbs, dumbly tossing ourselves overboard, goblets of glory carelessly thrown into the sea. We are a vessel of modern Christianity that the gloriously unknown Creator has struck violently with lightning, as if on the crowns of our humble heads. He has set us ablaze with a wise and holy providence, to colonize a new virgin world, to dispose of the devils there and in its place breathe into the nostrils of the noble heathens a moral law, a graceful and powerful law, of love and of brotherhood. We are a vessel of justice and mercy, of wealth and compassion. We are distinguished by a lineage of Abraham and Lot, the Macedonians, the Apostles. We are a vessel tirelessly navigating wretched and salty waters that crystallize on our rudder so that we must take hold of oars and strike the deep with our pious fortitude. We embrace the eerie vibrations one feels when land is a distant memory, the dangers of uncharted waters, the nautical monsters swimming beneath our battered hull, ready to devour us. We are not afraid of stilted winds, our bodies floating helplessly for days, in the maritime doldrums. When under fierce hunger we slaughter our lambs, eyes marble and sinless, we eat their flesh raw, our bodies too weak to digest, the pain in our bowels disfiguring us, uniting us. We are a vessel. We are one hundred men, we are fifty men, we are tired and we are poor, we are helpless. We are the ghosts of the departed, the lamented, and the fallen, tossed overboard with prayers, rising from the frothy foam to terrorize the survivors, chilling the delicate veil of hope that clings to the sallow cheeks of the youngest settler, who has left his sick mother and legless sister in search of gold, in search of a Title, Nathaniel, Navigator of the Atlantic. We are the spirit of integrity and humanity responding to the sea, the ungraspable phantom of life, luminous and opaque, slowly eroding our souls into an apparatus of desperation and madness. We are sailors on the threshold of discovery. We are a vessel whose wood girders are dismantling plank by plank, our skeletal structure rotting, festering with agony and suspicion. We are two leagues from a land mass glittering, skirting the farthest edge of the sea. We are a wave of unbridled joy rushing forward, then receding backward, apprehensive. Let us be struck by lightning awakening our senses, let the world divide into two, let our swollen and tired ligaments knit together as one, our body, in strength and infirmity, pain and pleasure, let us become one glorious body, without spot or wrinkle, and prepare to alight. We are righteous, we are monstrous, we are a vessel.