Pirates You Don't Know, and Other Adventures in the Examined Life: Collected Essays

The Pirate’s Waltz

1 { 1 } The box is important,because it’s part to the whole,as “sails on the horizon” stand for ships, men, and cannon of the pursuing navy. The box has ambitions: it wants to mean something else. The ridiculous pretensions of a fraught little box. The box is inconsequential, corrugated and glue, a standard medium container meant to hold only as many books as we can safely carry. It’s beginning to fail from fatigue and wear, and the faint tang of cat piss rises as it warms in the sun. I’ve hauled it around for twenty years as if it were a symbiotic creature, both burden and need, buried in the humid gut of a basement. Now I’ve pulled it out into the light for what I hope is the final time, to rid myself of it and signal what follows in these pages. What follows is not about boxes. What follows is about boxes. This book is a box, like any other box. Fuck me to tears. { 2 } A subcategory of tragic characters: beautiful losers. Not pretty people with low ambition or no talent. On the contrary: those who set off full of abilities but are quashed when the soul breaks its shrouds. I’ve known so many The Pirate’s Waltz 2 the pirate’s waltz of them, in cities, towns, the military, corporations, and universities that I’ve begun to wonder if they’re America’s main product, its most-wasted resource. Take my mother, please. Privileged last child of an adoring family, the college brat, the beauty. Secret wife, secret divorcée, secret adventurer. Grad student. Teacher. Wife again. Wife again. The abused. Virgin mother. The imperially middle-class American lady of the 1960s, fresh back from residence in Asia, taking classes at the university in origami and ikebana. Wit and brilliant mimic. Man-hater. Welfare statistic. Factory worker. Abuser. Crazy cat lady.The crone. I’ve reacted cruelly to beautiful losers, out of fear and self-flattery—as if I might have talents on their scale and end as they ended. I blamed my mother for being one. But what parasitic blame do I bear? { 3 } Maybe,in addition to being colorful and bawdy,pirates offer hope that daring will defeat privation and be rewarded with glut.“Who Dares,Wins,”as our friends in the Special Air Service say. Pirates refuse allegiance and romance only the self. The roguish pirate like a rock star, drunk and stranded with the governor’s daughter on a deserted isle, would be no gentleman as portrayed. Real pirates are killed with single bullets by seal snipers,whose virtuosity we praise. The rotting corpses of real pirates are hung at the mouth of the Thames as warning: Go your own way and you’ll go that way,apart from happy society, for all eternity. Eve turned to piracy under a perfect reign and headed for the new world, a wormy apple on her ensign. Pandora opened her treasure box to gain some control over a limited life. { 1 } To box—a sporting fight. To box (someone’s ears)—the use of unequal force,as an aristocrat might thrash a beggar in Trollope, or an adult hit a child. Box (up)—to be done with, to prepare for storage, disposal, forgetting. the pirate’s waltz 3 Box (in)—to contain or control. Box—the thing to think outside of. A warning of what we must escape if we’re to become our own persons. Once we’re out of the box, of course, there’s no going back in, though many have tried. Box—slang for the vagina,because it’s what the penis comes in.You can’t have my virginity, but you can have the box it was wrapped in. Etc. Box—container of all the evils of the world, actually a large clay or bronze jar for grain or wine.The persistence in culture that a woman put us all on the wrong path. But even Zeus wasn’t mad when Pandora opened it. Why would he be? It’s in our nature to want to know,the same frame-up as Eve’s. And wasn’t the evil released merely complexity, which created even more desire to know? I thought humankind’s distinction and chief merit was its questing for understanding. { 2 } My mother decorated with art objects she’d bought...