Cruise Ship Culture, Me, and The Void: Part One

                                                  

 In-between,  August 26, 2013

                              Cruise Ship Culture, The Void, and Me: Part One (unfinished)

         Somewhere between the existential duality of working and vacationing, I find myself alive. I exist in the in-between. Though I belong, because I am human, I do not belong because I am neither working on this ship nor vacationing on it. It is kind of the ship to allow this in-between state for certain people to belong un-be-longingly to.

         Present time: 22:00, Monday August 26, 2013; Sea Day. Crew Quarters, Deck 6 of 19. On the other side of this small cabin wall there is a very large stage where people are acting out the human ability of absurdity. Just on the other side of this very small cabin wall is an audience sitting in theater seats watching this reenactment of their absurdity, to their faces. The music penetrates the extremely small cabin wall, although the visuals do not. (I have seen this show before, so the visuals are stored in my memory.) Sound is more transient, transcendental, mobile, and therefore perhaps more powerful that visual representation, but we covet sight more. We are image-making creatures, as Cassie Lipowitz said last term, and we're dependent on those created visuals to comprehend our existence. Sound waves are too abstract for us to digest alone.

         I am sitting on a very small bed, although bigger than a cot that I share with my man Jay, in my underwear listening to the performance. The audience does not have any perception of my existence here eavesdropping on their entertainment. I do not exist to them. It is a strange sensation knowing that I am butted up against a huge theater right now. That if for some reason the illusion that is this cabin wall were to disappear, I would become revealed and I would be more out of place and absurd than the performers running around the stage with blue paint on their faces, drumming glow in the dark liquid into the air, and spitting marshmallows at each other. Is it then that God is just sitting on the other side of an illusory wall too? The drums and base traverse the space with spectacular results, their wave lengths are longer and more spread apart, they are able to travel through the environment, like a camel through the desert. Or maybe not a camel, but they make it to me and pass through this little cabin into the next with ease. I exist just as less to the sound waves as to the audience sitting to my left. I am an unseen audience.

                                                           A Very Small Bed, August 26, 2013
            It is in this void that I reside for the next month.  I am a phantom on this ship; I actually do not belong. I have been welcomed, but it is a gesture of generosity to someone else, not me. This generosity has been extended to Jay and therefore it has become my generosity as well. He is working right now, same as the performers and musicians on the other side of the cabin wall. I am not working, at least not for any entity on the ship except for myself.

         I read, watch, wonder, write, and attempt to culminate some cohesive notion on what to make of my project. But, I am not on vacation like the audience, and I am not working like the performers. I exist between the existential dualism of this ship. I am not even like the mold that resides in the carpets which surround us all: this place has become its permeate home. It has come to belong here due to the nature of the environment. At around 5000 vacationers a week for the better part of the year compounded by three years of sailing, just think about those figures and footsteps for a moment. How many times have these toilets been flushed with their hoarking vacuous sound as it violently sucks and chocks the waste down?

         In some way we all feel the presence of existing in this void when we cease to be distracted from it. It has just been illuminated for me right now. The curtain as been pulled aside and it just sits there allowing me to fully admire its beauty, horrendously beautiful the void is. It is allowing me this view for some reason that I am not fully aware of right now, but it does not halt my stare. The performers are enacting a part of the show where music is not required. It gives me the impression that I am alone again, but I know that not to be true, although I feel the illusion to be true. How do you trust yourself when even right inside of you this experience of existential dualism resides? The base has begun to growl again and we are together again. Me, the performers, the audience, the cabin wall are all bound together in this space of human recollection and complexity.

(To be continued...)