Keep on the Borderlands; II, ii

You need to understand the ship.

We talk about it a lot. Most recently it has been the HMS Swanky Blumpkin but is known by so many names. It is a table and it is a place and it is a vehicle. It is a vulpine monstrosity that was assembled of the earth and then expelled like a splinter from the fleshy coast.

Boasting twenty three forty six guns a load most substantial thickly twined and lacquered black decks and, at the prow, Athena with sword and scepter her brow furrowed in anger and disappointment. It is crewed by a brotherhood of survivalism. We have boiled soles and caught rats and known lean times. We have run down lesser craft without malice in order to fill bellies and maintain the Divine Propulsion. Piracy is wicked, I know. But you must understand that this is a warship.

It is needlessly ornate in crustacean rococo. Charred relief of daemons and water sprites interspersed with asymmetrical horns and swept scrollwork aproning each deck in a thick syrup of input. The decks are rigid and well-planed, buffed to a matte gloss catching points of reflected light at the peak of midday and when fully lanterned. Below decks are the dim halls full of directionless clicking and festooned with anonymous, locked doors. There is talk of lavish appointments, though others talk of cells. The crew is kept in barracks, row upon row of hammocks and sea chests bolted to the deck and stuffed with all manner of sanguine cargos. There are conference places and other rooms of particular purpose. A map room, for instance, dense with papyrus produced exclusively in the Nile delta fashioned as charts that must be chewed to a pulp and taken deep into one’s own cellular structure in order to be made plain. Information transference of a kind known only to the weathered primitives who see with sight unbounded and fold in upon themselves with laughter at the thought of such meager expression.

The banner above is graying. A skeleton, certainly, but not a head. Not a man at all, in fact. No one had ever surmounted the mainmast beyond the nest and so the original standard flew still. Flew, that is, when nature allowed. The bulk beneath had no such propriety. She needed no wind, no oars. She simply continues.

To understand that vessel is to understand her master. Identity in this case is not a matter of essence or achievement but rather a by-product of the relationship between captain and ship. It exists as function; even as lack of function. It exists in perpetuity even hacked and burned, rent asunder by indignant authority or criminal neglect. It is really just an error, a pock or defect on the cornea perceived as a black shape insinuating itself across each field of vision impossible to arrest impossible to approach.