The Search for Oarlock

 

La Strada is Italian for "The Road".  It is also the title of my favorite movie.  To me, it is the story of a person divided in his natures with only the tenuousness of his sad love to join  him into one identity as he travels the road of life.  This movie has meant as much to my heart as the Divine Comedy has meant to my mind.

 

Oarlock is or was a real person.  Described to me as a kindly man, a spiritual man, a loving man, a man of life so contrary to my white mourning.  We shared the title of Dread Naught, but it doesn't fit me.  I fear many things.  I fear most the communion. 

 

I think, maybe, I was mistaken as a Dread because of my reaction to an early passage in Dante's poem.  For forty-four years, I have awakened, sometimes literally in a sweat, to that same nightmare.  "Who are these?"  "...those who have known neither praise nor disgrace".   Those who did nothing, tried nothing, know no love, nor even disdain, from heaven or hell.  I dread this most.  It brings to mind a purpose shared with me, "God placed me on this earth to experience the stuff She just doesn't have time for Herself." 

 

We were in a club in Brooklyn.  This large table in the back was engulfed in smoke, in a traditional Jamaican way.  There were twelve of us there, sort of a last supper?  I wondered who was out doing the silver work.  One fellow to my right leaned forward to the point of being only inches from my face.  He seemed to examine microscopically every pore, scar and feature of my face.  There was only curiousness in his large dark bloodshot eyes.  He leaned back and said to his mates, " 'e be Oarlock!".  Slowly, The Eleven very slowly leaned forward, very slowly.  Eleven dark faces framed by halos of natty hair.  They leaned back, so slowly.  One said with excitement, "ras' clot, you be right mon!".  Another, "Oarlock!".  Another, " 'cept, one t'ing.".  "what be dat?" asked the first.  " 'e be white." he answered, "Oarlock the White Dread".

 

Since then I have dreamed to meet this alter-ego, this doppelganger, this mirror.  This black man I look like who is all things, I'm not.  I look inside, he's not there.  So I have to go to Jamaica, find Oarlock the Rasta.  I hope he still lives and he can help me and teach me to be like him, a kindly man.

 

Surreal, I wrongfully took pride in quite often being told that, as a young man, I resembled Andre Breton; himself long since a haunting.  Surreal because I fear the many ghosts I have met and the specter is the key to Breton's thought.  That was until I surely was visited by Jeffery and sent on this quest for powers, and "the way" to go forward, placing the oar in the lock. 

...obviously mistaken, note Breton's excessive amount of hair and much too low ears

...though this photo "resonates" with me

 

But, Breton is too the key to this all.  Contrary to those who have consistently said my pain and love is not unique...it MUST be.  It has no purpose if it is not.

"I simply believe that between my thought, such as it appears in what material people have been able to read that has my signature affixed to it, and me, which the true nature of my thought involves in something but precisely what I do not yet know, there is a world, an imperceptible world of phantasms." said Breton.

 

As was said to me, "People die to benefit someone else.".  Thank you friend, Jeffery...I will search for Oarlock, I promise.

 

 "Le Sommeil", Salvador Dali

 

"I intend to mention, in the margin of the narrative I have yet to relate, only the most decisive episodes of my life as I can conceive it apart from its organic plan, and only insofar as it is at the mercy of chance--the merest as well as the greatest--temporarily escaping my control, admitting me to an almost forbidden world of sudden parallels, petrifying coincidences, and reflexes peculiar to each individual, of harmonies struck as though on the piano, flashes of light that would make you see, really see, if only they were not so much quicker than all the rest." Breton from Nadja