Walking on Water

Hav­ing been relieved of my duties, I was sent below, never to stand another watch while I remained in First Divi­sion. Even I had to laugh as vari­a­tions of the story, about how I’d hit the old man in the head with orange peel­ings, fil­tered back down to me through the crew. Lest I get a swelled head over the mat­ter, I was put on report for hav­ing been derelict in the per­for­mance of my duties. Why just the thought alone, of a Captain’s Mast, had a very sober­ing effect on me as I won­dered how the Cap­tain could objec­tively pre­side over a hear­ing around an inci­dent in which he had also been involved. How could he deliver a fair and impar­tial ver­dict? Just because he’d seen the tor­pedo before I had, did that mean I’d been derelict in the per­for­mance of my duties? Or had he writ­ten me up because I’d acci­den­tally hit him in the head with orange peel­ings? Again, did that mean I hadn’t been pay­ing atten­tion to what I was sup­posed to be doing? What if my atten­tion had been focused in a dif­fer­ent quad­rant, as it was, from that in which the tor­pedo first appeared? Would that have meant I had been neg­li­gent in any way? Or was it because he’d been per­son­ally offended by my fail­ure to con­form to his expec­ta­tions of me, that he wrote me up? Obvi­ously, a bruised ego was hardly suf­fi­cient evi­dence to prove my guilt, unless he, whom I had so offended, hap­pened to also be the Cap­tain, my appointed judge ’n’ jury in this instance.

Was I guilty of hav­ing been derelict in the per­for­mance of my duties? Indeed I was, for I’d left my soul to drown in a sea of uncon­scious behav­ior. Hav­ing per­formed a minor mir­a­cle, stay­ing on top of all this instinc­tive behav­ior, I had yet to res­cue her from the clutches of the Great Gray Mother of Instinct. In other words, I had yet to find my way in real life. Because the way I should go remained so unclear to me at the time, I couldn’t hold onto it for very long with­out its van­ish­ing from my grasp. I had a choice, either I played with my self, that is, I played along with the Navy’s pro­gram for me or I played, once again, with my old imag­i­nary or real—depending on how one viewed the matter—childhood play­mate, my soul. Whereas I’d made the right choice when I res­cued her from the sea in the meta­phys­i­cal realm, at the same time, I had offended the Great Gray Whore on the phys­i­cal plane. Indeed, I was begin­ning to see just how dif­fi­cult it is to serve two masters.

By means of a sim­ple tor­pedo had my soul brought home to me not only the threat of death ’n’ destruc­tion, but also the promise of new life. In her own way, had she forced me to rise above my feel­ings of pow­er­less­ness, to stand tall against the raw power of Nature. In other words, she had tricked me into momen­tar­ily embrac­ing a whole new approach to life, one in which I could indeed walk on water or at least over­come the severe lim­i­ta­tions of a purely instinc­tive existence.