The Surf's Song of Longevity

The winter surf plays it's daily drama next to the smaller aggregate of people at the shore.  Most of these are the permanent residents of Carlsbad.  In the summer months, these ranks are swelled by thousands of visitors who move into the vacation rentals along the beach roads and the coastal highway for anywhere from a couple of weeks to three months.  It's as I've said, "Summer and some are not... some are tourists and others are two-wrists".  

In the distance can be seen a mauve blur that indicates the Oceanside pier, a huge structure jutting out into the sea.  To the south, not seen here, is the nuclear reactor and the lagoon where someone dumped his or her fish tank a while back and slimed the area with a fungus from the Mediterranean Sea, which the city of Carlsbad managed to contain.  Further down can be seen "mooring balls" and the sea worthy sailboats that tie up to them, renting the space for as low as one hundred and fifty dollars a month.  Oh well.  A dollar as a doll is.

The seen brings to my mind a verse I wrote in Paris back in 1980, in a poem I now call "Rugged Comprehension" (click the title to go to the page, there is a link at the bottom of that page to get you back to this one).

Sand bed clothes upon the shore; waves' white caps will beat them all the more.

Clothes grow ragged, must be changed,

on your back as time goes by.

So this planet's re-arranged on which life once freely thrived.

The poem actually entertains the concept that the reason for man's irrational and erroneous behavior is largely because, like the tortoise, the human being is a creature that should be lasting much longer per individual than presently is the case.  Each individual is actually not even fulfilling one tenth of his or her term of longevity, or as I put it for suburban people, "lawngevity", or, if you had a little more, you could mow the lawn, or the mower the merrier.  ...That the principle cause of the ineptitude of the present and historic human being is principally due to immaturity, or the classic behavior of a ten-year-old in an adult body.  What a tenure.

Where have you heard of the thousand-year-old man?  How about the Yeti or perhaps the legend of Big Foot?  These legends spring up around areas where an individual might be exposed to "glacial milk" or a residue rich in multitudes of trace minerals in the water supply which if present in the daily intake of the average person, can extend the ideal "genetic longevity" up to 120 years.  Longevity could be seen as a trajectory that, if fueled by the proper ingredients, could easily extend a lifetime well beyond the centagenarian years.

The present concept of the ideal longevity, septuagenarian males and octogenarian females, is merely, apparently, the extent of the resistance or resilience of the human organism to a degraded environment and a leeched food and water supply.  The elusiveness and reclusive tendencies of the legendary yeti matches the profile of individuals among the human communities that attain the wisdom that normal maturation would accede to that would have convinced said individuals to relinquish all contact with what they must construe as a troublesome and death-dealing social order of all human societies.  

Just the other day a yeti avoided a bad accident because he turned out to be a recluse driver.

Actually it was the role of the salmon to return the minerals, leached out of the soil, to the land by bringing them back from the ocean to the mountains, where their minerals were re-distributed by the bear, the eagle, and man.  It is a part of a concept called the "migration of flocculant elements" and the indicative of lithotic, non-neurological intelligence.  The salmon were supposed to return into every river on the face of the earth that connected to the sea.

And so these people return to the sea, and walk beside it, sensing something is missing from their lives.  They are trying to listen to the song of the sea.  When there were fish in abundance and clams did not die, and the coral grew healthy and strong beneath a clear blue sky.  Listen to the song of the  sea.  It's bigger than you it's bigger than me. Listen if you can, to where our courses ran.

Click here to return to "A Sea Song, Part One".

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