the men victims neither of famine nor war but caught in travail nevertheless. Employed for globalization, meant to escort and guard an accumulation of goods they are not permitted to touch. They have all the attributes of the marginalized: despair masked by detachment, self-hatred masked by humor, capitulation masked by shows of defiance. In the ports theirs is a search for bliss and unconsciousness, an escape from memory.
I tried to meet eye to eye and shake hands with all my crewmates, especially those who did not trust me, which were most. I worked hard, I listened, I didn’t take unreasonable offense, and insofar as I understood, gave none. The old virtues. When we were in port I bought local recordings of local music for our shipboard music library. I bought local food and cooked aboard the ship for whoever wanted a change. I got some of my watch away from the port and out into the countryside to see people working with not very much—a worldwide way of makeshift life as amazing to the eye as a desert river in high flood. Also, for the first time in perhaps five or six years, I began to visit hospices again, to see if I could recomprehend charity, about which I had once been so ruthless. The ships I came to feel comfortable in mostly worked the East China and South China seas—Singapore, Hong Kong, Manila, Haiphong, Shanghai. In those cities I got to know some of the hospice workers and through them witnessed, once again, the physical damage caused by the humiliations of industrial manufacturing, the Western plan to create wealth.
I wished in my reveries to be like Minty, free of any need to judge, acting as a vessel of forgiveness and joy; but it was these very things that formed a final barrier for me. I withheld my joy if I wasn’t sure of my company. I judged and brooded. And I prayed to Minty as though he were a saint.
There was no single event in the rhythm of doing physical work, riding out the storms, and gazing to sea, no apocalyptic moment of change, but one day I realized I no longer had any desire to be recognized. This one thing, not having to be singled out for adulation, was the beginning of a new awareness. I might put it this way: I was no longer afraid of immersion in the unvarnished world. I no longer needed to be regarded as a man with campaign ribbons from the most just of human wars. Or even to be recognized as a smart fellow. All I needed to do now was to reduce somewhat the level of suffering where I encountered it, to moderate the levels of cruelty to which so many remained inured. I still wanted such people—the indifferent—to be held accountable. I wanted someone to entreat with them and subject them to the spirit of the law. But mine was no longer the voice to do it. I had no more plans for reorganization and reconstruction. I had nothing, anymore, to sell.
On a trip to Calcutta in 1991 I met Mother Teresa. Like Minty she broke down further my sense of what was right, of what had to happen, by entering the misery around her instead of trying to beat it into submission. I don’t know about sainthood, but I would have to say she was owned by no one but God, and that her God was as ecumenical as the air we inhaled. She took me with her into the streets— or I followed her; she was not an instructor in that sense—and I saw unfold there what must have occurred in Galilee all those centuries ago. Her incomprehensible compassion and ministration, anonymous as water.
I got off the ships for good in Manila, during the last year of Corazon Aquino’s presidency. I had no goal after that but to encounter the destitute, to offer a few words of condolence, eye to eye, hand to hand, and for that moment to have no separation between us because of race or other circumstance. Sometimes, with the elderly, I would try to wash a face. I provided as I could. Through a retired ship captain I got a job as an orderly in the Cancer Detection Center at Quezon Memorial Hospital. The income from that job
I tried to meet eye to eye and shake hands with all my crewmates, especially those who did not trust me, which were most. I worked hard, I listened, I didn’t take unreasonable offense, and insofar as I understood, gave none. The old virtues. When we were in port I bought local recordings of local music for our shipboard music library. I bought local food and cooked aboard the ship for whoever wanted a change. I got some of my watch away from the port and out into the countryside to see people working with not very much—a worldwide way of makeshift life as amazing to the eye as a desert river in high flood. Also, for the first time in perhaps five or six years, I began to visit hospices again, to see if I could recomprehend charity, about which I had once been so ruthless. The ships I came to feel comfortable in mostly worked the East China and South China seas—Singapore, Hong Kong, Manila, Haiphong, Shanghai. In those cities I got to know some of the hospice workers and through them witnessed, once again, the physical damage caused by the humiliations of industrial manufacturing, the Western plan to create wealth.
I wished in my reveries to be like Minty, free of any need to judge, acting as a vessel of forgiveness and joy; but it was these very things that formed a final barrier for me. I withheld my joy if I wasn’t sure of my company. I judged and brooded. And I prayed to Minty as though he were a saint.
There was no single event in the rhythm of doing physical work, riding out the storms, and gazing to sea, no apocalyptic moment of change, but one day I realized I no longer had any desire to be recognized. This one thing, not having to be singled out for adulation, was the beginning of a new awareness. I might put it this way: I was no longer afraid of immersion in the unvarnished world. I no longer needed to be regarded as a man with campaign ribbons from the most just of human wars. Or even to be recognized as a smart fellow. All I needed to do now was to reduce somewhat the level of suffering where I encountered it, to moderate the levels of cruelty to which so many remained inured. I still wanted such people—the indifferent—to be held accountable. I wanted someone to entreat with them and subject them to the spirit of the law. But mine was no longer the voice to do it. I had no more plans for reorganization and reconstruction. I had nothing, anymore, to sell.
On a trip to Calcutta in 1991 I met Mother Teresa. Like Minty she broke down further my sense of what was right, of what had to happen, by entering the misery around her instead of trying to beat it into submission. I don’t know about sainthood, but I would have to say she was owned by no one but God, and that her God was as ecumenical as the air we inhaled. She took me with her into the streets— or I followed her; she was not an instructor in that sense—and I saw unfold there what must have occurred in Galilee all those centuries ago. Her incomprehensible compassion and ministration, anonymous as water.
I got off the ships for good in Manila, during the last year of Corazon Aquino’s presidency. I had no goal after that but to encounter the destitute, to offer a few words of condolence, eye to eye, hand to hand, and for that moment to have no separation between us because of race or other circumstance. Sometimes, with the elderly, I would try to wash a face. I provided as I could. Through a retired ship captain I got a job as an orderly in the Cancer Detection Center at Quezon Memorial Hospital. The income from that job
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