"Nearer, My God, to Thee"

Still. Cold. Dark. Broken. Buried. Eternally.

A salty muddy grain tilts back and then forward…it leans its tiny weight into mighty frigid tides of darkly sea…and rolls.

Another tilts and treads and follows and another and another until a wisp of grains catches a wisp of current and sharply rises from a billion years of stifled nothingness. And then…another wisp…and another and even more until there is a seaborn twirling tornado for every year they have been lying still there.

Betraying the weight of the ocean and the gravity of time, the sea bed lunges upward in Universal defiance…the heave of its mighty black chest shocks the watery Lordess above it. The earth groans in its agony of movement, and the sea echoes the pain through its vastly empty expanse.

The body moves. Its dismembered, shattered pieces of self…rotting rusty bits that were built to crease all the elements of nature now break apart with a whisper…silent rusty fragments growing into the endless muddy grains below to find its final place in eternal frigid darkness. Now…the body moves again.

The entire body seeks to find its self once more…broken a million and a million times over…the innumerable fragile slivers of steel and wood and bone vibrate to the frequency of galaxies lost in other immense dark seas…they start to slip out of their forever place and into the now…they slide…they swim…they fly…they unearth themselves…they spin…they tumble…they move in every dynamic way of this world…they seek. And they find. And they become.

The slivers are pieces and pieces then parts and parts of the whole…but it is not whole yet…until it rises…not until its grave is far beneath it again…not until the salty weight of the sea has been replaced by the lightness of air. The body begins to form its own gravity…its own knot in space and time where they will intertwine once more. Sound splits the gravely silent places of the deathly ocean…earth groans, metal creaks and screams, even the final note of a wet violin is faintly heard.

The ship begins to rise through the blue-black hues of its coffin…it defies the hold of its oceanic depths and of death…its song is a cacophony of ununified elements becoming one…an orchestra anxiously awaiting its conductor. The ship rises above the ocean floor with muddy rivers of rocky beads drifting back down to assume their forever fate. The ship rises as bows and columns and bulwarks and decks and engines and windows and scars are healed and tables and beds and games and plates form as bodies long dead are draped again in floating fabric long dissolved.

Through a moon lit night and a placid sea, the great ship launches itself out of death’s abyss with a ferocious blast of water and air and might. The two last pieces of its enormous mass come together in a titanic metallic clutch that makes fate tremble sheepishly. Its black and white and gold and steel and promise reject the laws of what must be with its demand that I must be again.

A violin was playing….and the sea calmed.

***

The first mate described the weather as a cool and calm day with visibility of five nautical miles on April 14th, 1912. Icebergs had been seen in the area and reported to the captain. The captain, much to the dismay of the passengers, who were excited to cross the Atlantic in record time, decided to change course twelve degrees to the south and to slow the ship to ten knots. The captain thought the slower speed and more southernly course would both keep the ship out of danger and allow it enough time to steer away from an iceberg if need be. The rest of the Titanic’s journey to New York was unremarkable. It arrived slightly off schedule on April 18th, 1912. (Credit the New York Times, April 19th, 1912)