From Jester To King -II

So I’m on this boat with its long wooden deck and I’m on this heavy boat with all these people who I like and who I really want to like me and yes they seem to like and respect me in return in ways I’ve never been au fait with and certainly not in such clear terms, and the boat seems to have everything on it you need for being and living, like it has food and beds and it has love, but none of this clearly visible, and there’s just a sense of oneness and cosiness, it’s like an all-encompassing space, and I move around this boat with glee, with joy, with this unfamiliar sense of total safety and nurture and having all the things I want and need, can this really be true I wonder, the things I want not being anything material but being things in the field of love, exchange and warmth, and the people are not necessarily people whose faces I can pinpoint and whose names I can exactly recall although they’re close and similar to people I have known from camps and schools and trips and dreams and get-togethers and sleep-overs and Canada and multi-family holidays and all the people I’ve known altogether in one space, they show glimpses of being these people, they are not exactly them, and I am at no point even remotely questioning why I don’t exactly know these people because I feel I know them as archetypes or just as people who would give me the comfort that the people they represent would certainly give me.

And as I move about this deck of the boat checking and talking and carousing, there’s this tiny alien sense of being in charge in contrast to the habitual nagging sense of being beholden, in charge of I don’t know exactly what, and then it becomes clear that there’s this overriding purpose, this purpose to this boat and that this purpose is precisely nothing, that the purpose is just to be on the boat; I have no idea if the boat is even going some place, and I don’t make it my business to find out, although I know it’s moving, and this is not an allegory, it is simply that there is no question of ever having to leave the boat, of being ejected, and that we will be able to stay on this boat for as long as we need in warmth and love, and yet, there is an objective to this boat ride, either in my mind whilst I’m on this boat, or that I am correctly copping that everyone’s in the same headspace wanting exactly what I want, i.e. love, warmth, exchange, abandon, and so therefore none of this, these feelings, these phenomena, will be torn away since they are commonly sought, and we can just rest, on the boat, without fear, without seeing what’s next, because the overriding purpose is just the boat.

Now I notice here that there’s a sea/ocean outside the boat’s long glass window and I notice an enormous swell and the waves are vast and the sea is rough —how had I not noticed— but the boat is not swaying all that badly and I’m not nauseated or losing my balance but there is spray and water coming inside this boat with its covered deck yet somehow this water comes and goes and it doesn’t matter, it’s no threat, but it occurs to me that I should make people aware of the bad weather, you know, because it might get worse and become critical, not because I’m worried, but only because I’m finally owning up, showing that I’m part of what decides, what makes the rules, and I feel in part responsible for my-here-boat-people some of whom I notice are younger than I am, although it’s not an age thing necessarily, so I go up to one of the organisers of the boat who I’d been obliquely aware of throughout, a good man, not abusing his power, I start clamouring so that now a few can hear me through the ambient noise, that we should just be mindful that the boat has taken on water and that the water is rough not that I’m saying the boat is in trouble, it’s more that I want people to be aware of something I feel they should be aware of, they should not just be oblivious, and as I take up my call, I notice a slight sense of disregard, of abandonment by my boat community and I feel a tinge of sadness or a qualm at being ever so slightly overlooked and of them not seeing things my way necessarily, although yet in some sense I feel they’ve now taken note and it’s at this point that I notice that the other end of the boat, which isn’t like the main boat bit at all, not that it necessarily should have been, this other bit of the boat has pulled into some incongruous small dock, a dock with pebble wall and pier and people are pointing out that there was never any danger, see, because we are here safe, but look here I’m thinking: this is surely missing the point, and it’s not clear to me whether we have to get off the boat just because the waters got a bit rough and wait a second!! can I not just stay on the boat, please, please, because I’d quite like to stay here?