Cruising. An electric glide in blue, a hootenanny on the
bounty where man and state-of-the-art everything meet at
rainbow’s bend, where dissimilarity and disparity
are dissolved in round the clock embibing and feasting.
The winner’s circle is as wide as the cruiser’s
city-like circumference. Its membership includes the moneyed,
and a hefty contingent of latter day secularists -- the
god-leery -- who, looking to fan waning spiritual indices,
come to view the cruise as a personalized Zen retreat that
seamlessly synonymizes self-gratification and self-actualization.
Cruising's safe harbour is founded on three ontical invariables.
The vessel, the mother of all floats, is the hardware; the
software is the programmed excess; want and desire furnish
the circuitry. The experience appeals as a temporary stay
against dystopia by investing the Garden of Eden simulacrum
with fabulous everything for passengers whose election and
self-esteem, like water and wave, constitute a single enduring
truth. Money is virtually unnecessary, with everything paid
for up front
The
cruise ship, which does not concern itself with commercial
transport, is a self-contained alternative world that produces
nothing of its own except the cycle of appetite and satiation.
Using the premise of adventure as a foil, it drops anchor
at the world’s great port cities to resupply and especially
relieve the float of its accumulated waste tonnage, while
the excited passenger, having braved the feral and formless
seas for days on end, locks onto land like the pioneer of
old in the throes of discovery, where he can indulge in
the quotidian for "a day in the life of" before
returning to the grind of balancing his ever increasing
appetite with the body’s finite capacities. And if
he should succumb to dyspepsia or the heaves, the sea is
the mother of all receptacles.
Cruising
caters to the recovery of man’s latent capacity for
civilized behaviour. Since relations in the real world are
often frayed at best, and bellicose at worst, cruisers,
for whom want and satisfaction are as easily done as inhaling
and exhaling, take to deck chairs in order to discover what
is benign in their natures which they conveniently confuse
for their true nature. Under the spell of uninterrupted
satiation, envy is allowed to take a breather for as long
as the cruise lasts, which facilitates the surreal commingling
of the very rich and the just rich who share the same public
spaces as the not so rich.
Even
more important than the cruise’s concentration of
abundance is the vast backdrop of the sea. “In landlessness
alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as
God,” writes the author of Moby Dick, whose lyricism
did for the seas what Wordsworth did for land. Like an island,
the cruise is surrounded by water -- its halo or spirit,
if you will -- but with the added virtue of being itinerant.
If man has ravaged and plundered the good earth, he is drawn
to the floating island of the cruise ship because the sea
is inviolable. It can’t be built on, dug up, reshaped
according to man’s will. The sea relieves the passenger
of the heavy burden of his history and even time itself
for there are no markings, no apparent graves, no older
waves, no monuments to victory and defeat. As his eyes sweep
the sea's expanse, everything becomes possible again, all
directions are equally valid.
In
his land life, the cruiser is constantly reminded of his
baser self, which the cruising project suspends. Signing
up is tantamount to checking into a paradisiacal rehab centre
where he can be temporarily cured of his nature. In the
pampered environment of surfeit and leisure, his social
and gentle sides are lulled into action as if by the easy
pitch of the ship, which facilitates thoughts of utopia,
to a pre-lapsarian world where everything is provided for
and absolutely nothing asked of the mind which conveniently
shuts down, the pleasure of which is not to be discounted
and may account for Freud’s claim that we all subconsciously
harbour a return to the inanimate (i.e. death wish).
Since
man can not alter the sea in any significant way, the cruiser
can rest easy his competitive, ambitious side because being
able to indulge in a cruise is already an ambition realized.
In the absence of future projects that require land for
their conception and consummation, sunrises and sunsets
take on greater importance as the erstwhile driven citizen
of the world waxes poetic about what really matters in life.
In between cocktails and prawns, he suddenly finds himself
surfing the waves of metaphysics, asking the largest questions
of himself, which give him new found reasons to like what
he sees evolving into a more complete human being.
Given
the growing popularity of cruising, the forward-looking
are already asking: where to, what next? I, for one, won’t
be surprised that if man survives his nature – that
is learns to tweak his genetic code before he self-annihilates
-- space cruising will be de rigueur. In this brave
new encapsulated world, man will leave the good earth as
easily as we leave our garages in the morning; and with
resupply a non-issue and the universe serving as a waste
dump, there will be no compelling reason to return. Perhaps
just then, I’ll be among the many lining up to purchase
my ticket to ride. First port of call: the dark side of
the moon.
