Van Morrison - Into the Mystic
Too Late to Stop Now
For anyone who ever went to sea
I rode the ship out of the harbor into the unknown. There were serious men on board, men who leaned and rocked in the copper light of summer. I saw the gunners and the engineers and the men who never saw the light of day if they didn’t pollute their lungs with smoke, living and sleeping in a bath of red light below decks. I hung with the men who leaned on lifelines, forever cool. Mother Pacific granted us permission to move and the sky blew wind in our faces. They sent big rollers to us, just off the bow, and I felt the friction of 8,500 tons of groaning steel in my teeth. We loved the magic act of the disappearing shore. How did we know the helmsman wasn’t insane? It gave me a thrill as the hull touched off sea spray in cerulean and azure and tainted white, hissing in a flavor of saltwater native to the California coast. People crowded everywhere, privacy being the most sought-after commodity. Wiry men, fat men, powerful men, lean men all in blue coveralls, crowding mess decks and passageways and chow lines, dirty and stained, some with rags in the back pocket, and the omnipresent sulfur of diesel and grease lingering in the stale air within the skin of the ship. Everything had a power to it, an unrelenting force designed to safeguard us against the crushing depths of the ocean and its floor. Never again, never in my all-things-considered short life would I feel this transform inside of me like it did then – a satisfying surge of fear and adrenaline, of inner power, rising to a boil, this secret force of the soul of all the world’s oceans.
Then I found myself in the deep eternity, over the horizon, out from and far away from vision-polluting light, where the crimson glow of a cigarette is visible two miles away. That’s when the night sky reveals her true self as the Milky Way wraps its way around your world. I stood with the same wide-eyed wonder as the ancient Greeks who stood on a hill and named those constellations. Was it a million stars? Two? I saw the sunrise and erupt in chimney red and Halloween orange. If you’re the praying kind you have offered a thankful message for all things glorious, and if you’re not, you may still stand awestruck as I did. I was happily removed from the trappings of vehicle traffic and smiling because I was eyebrow-deep in a life less ordinary. My sleep will be sweeter than any you will ever experience. Time expands and contracts without notice out there because the customary rules of time and space no longer apply.
The place where the sea and sky meet is called the offing, and you will never arrive. It’s not a destination - there’s no marking it on the chart. This is not cause for lament. There will always be more sea and sky to fuel dreams and imaginations. The long trick must eventually conclude, and Channel Fever - that electric pulsing of finding the buoy that marks the way home, turning the wheel over, and making for the harbor - will ripple across the decks. The Mystic called and I went out to it. I surrendered just enough and submitted to the daily struggle against the elements and things wildly beyond my control, and then I began to see with new eyes and experienced my life with greater understanding. After a strong drink, of course. No one will understand except those who’ve answered the clarion call, and that is as it should be. There’s no Rosetta Stone for that language or the hieroglyphics inked into Sailors’ skin - those lines and spikes and anchors, those shell-backed denizens of the deep and Hula girls and three-masted ships. I carry these tokens and momentoes with me because eventually, I had to go the way of Homer - to walk inland until I found a place that “knows nothing of the sea,” plant my oars in the ground, and make an offering to Posideon. Then, at long last, the journey is over.