escape I'll try
rage rage against the dying of the light
It is Dylan Thomas who invites us to finish our life in glorious moments instead of going gentle into that good night of death.
And right he is.
Well, at least I could be a fair player and a good loser who knows to recognize the end of the game.
Unlike that old Indian of whom is told that he went away from his kin and his tribe to wait for death in a cavern.
Unlike one of my cats who found herself a nice dark place in the mid of summer.
And so I decided, a long time ago, to walk into the sea when it is my time to leave this place to my kin, to the other members of the tribe.
To you.
But not in Italy.
I do not know my way at the bottom of the Mediterranean.
No, it has to be the North Sea.
I hope to be back in Holland when I feel the cold wind announcing the arrival of Old Father Time with his scythe. At the isle of Terschelling where these thoughts started to visit me.
There I want to start my journey, my walk through the seas.
My way to reincarnation.
I think I know my way at the bottom of the sea.
Do I really?
What if I miss the turning to the left, to the Albion isle, and enter the cold of the Arctic Ocean. Is it possible to withstand these cold waters?
I do not like cold water.
No, I want to go to Scotland, to the north of the Hebrides, where every now and then someone wades into the sea up to his waist, carrying in his hand a cup full of ale, which he then throws into the sea, as an offering to some water spirit who has to be propitiated.
I like ale.
I guess I will not get used to the salt water.
What about eating raw fish? I do not even like cooked fish.
What if I miss the way to Scotland, not even can find the Giants Causeway?
Passing Ireland, unable to have the chance of becoming a Druid.
Then I have to walk to America.
Oh my God, the pressures of the depths.
What if I meet the Kraken in one of these trenches. What if it eats, swallows me? Then I have to wait, as Tennyson writes,
until the latter fire shall beat the deep;
then, once by men and angels to be seen,
in roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
Better to avoid these trenches, I like to rise at the north coasts of America.
The marvelous skyline of Manhattan.
Makes me recalling my feelings at the end of Planet of the Apes, when Charlton Heston, after being released by his imprisoners, going along the beach to be his own man, realizes where he has been all that time.
His last lines: You blew it up. God damn you. God damn you all to hell.
My first thoughts then: that must be nice - a walk along the coastline of Europe, from the North of the Netherlands to the south of Spain, and no one bothering you with all sorts of do's and dont's.
Or do I have to rise after times have turned too, when my marbles do call for my envelope to return as a poor Indian boy who just has to wait for the conquering Europeans, setting foot on the new continent, the archers and the Fathers, these Christian soldiers marching onward and onward and onward ...
Or shall I have to walk the Atlantic from the north to the south?
Is it possible that I get lost there. That after ages of ages, when the American continent, driven up by the whole fetch of the Pacific to reunite with Europe and Africa ... that I will be crushed between these colliding tectonic plates?
An unreincarnable fossil.
Lots of questions. But they will not frighten me.
I will walk into the sea.
And the sea will be kind to me
