"It takes a heap o’ livin’ in a house t’ make it home"

Besides the Psalms, Song of Solomon, Job, Ecclesiastes, and other books in our well-worn Bible, I remember only one book of "poetry" in my childhood years at home in Kansas: the folksy, kitschy verse of a transplanted Brit, Edgar A. Guest, who spent 40 years in Michigan writing thousands of poems for books, newspapers, radio broadcasts, and even TV.  His most famous line is quoted above as title of this piece, and is taken from his best loved poem, "Home."

My relationship with housing has been exceptionally promiscuous.  I was born at home, not in a hospital.  And in the course of eight decades I have made my home in small and large houses, condos, coops, and apartments--in cities, suburbs, and countryside.  I have also lived in a dorm room, a mobile home, 2 basements, above a garage, in 2 garages (made into an apartment), 2 boats, a treehouse,  in Maine, Manhattan, France (Paris, Nice), Oklahoma, Kansas, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Long Island, Flushing, California, Maryland, and, given the boating adventures, every state between Maine and Florida.  So where/what is home?

Though I have lived in scores of houses, from one point of view (the bucolic-Romantic construals of Gaston Bachelard and Martin Heidegger), I have mostly been homeless.  Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, which is assigned in many schools of architecture, argued that a "home," properly so called, requires a house with three levels, set in nature.  The basement, locus of the irrational, fears, and alimentary provisions, is balanced at the other pole by the attic, which provides a long view, an assessment of the grounds and building as a whole. These poles sandwich the main floor, where living, effort, work, and sociality reign.  Plato's social anthropology is thus echoed with its tri-level division of lower appetites (irrationalities), "thoracic" willful action (heart, lungs, arms), crowned by the sublimity of the soul and its Reason--just as the State is best organized by a hierarchy of the appetitive workers under the courageous military class, both governed by the rational dictates of the philosopher-king. More than two thousand years later, Freud proposed his own three-level analysis of the person as an ordering of unconscious drives under the supervision of the dictates of the ego, and both checked by the conscious strictures of the superego "above." Anyone with a passing knowledge of Western culture could immediately supply myriad parallels in Dante, Milton, Wagnerian operas and children's fairy tales--not to mention contemporary movies, video games, and travel guides.

I come honestly to my own default preference for this topomythology: my birth-home, and those of my grandparents and neighbors in Kansas and Oklahoma were--or were intended to be--of this sort, though many had only a root-cellar, and most had no second story, though there were aspirations when budgets (rarely) allowed.  Our current house is a small Victorian with full basement, main floor (living/cooking/socializing), second floor (sleeping/bathing/offices), and an attic floor (art studio). I am always more comfortable seeing "nature" from my windows: in Kansas it was our Victory Garden, livestock pens, and weedy fields. Now it is our gardens, lawn, the many trees that line the streets, and the large wooded park across the street.  Heidegger--as one might have anticipated from his monumental Being and Time, and his patrimony of southern German peasant stock and agricultural preoccupations--carried aspects of such meditations into some core ideas of his later work, in his  Building, Dwelling, Thinking (1954), in which "dwelling" comes to assume the central role in the "unfolding of Being."

"[H]uman being consists in dwelling and, indeed, dwelling in the sense of the stay of mortals on the earth...But ‘on the earth’ already means ‘under the sky.’ Both of these also mean ‘remaining before the divinities’ and include a ‘belonging to men's being with one another.’ By a primal oneness the four—earth and sky, divinities and mortals—belong together in one."

Dwelling is being at home, where one "has a place." This sense of place is what grounds Heidegger's notion of spatiality.  In dwelling, then, human existence is located within a set of practices that are "familiar,"   Being has us in unfolding within the "four-fold" of earth/sky/gods/mortals, and the poet and "thinker" can be our only real guides in this risking by means of language.  By a scandalous oversimplification, I'll risk saying that this simply means that we have no access to the world apart from our situation:  Dream as we may about knowing God, nature, ourselves and others by access to the Absolute, history, science, revelation, reason, or intuition, we are still, always in the limited here and now of living as experiencing bodies standing on the earth and under the heavens.

It seems obvious to me that a major weakness in the views of Bachelard and Heidegger stems from their ethnocentrism.  I would be surprised to find that people from non-European cultures, and people from epochs at great remove from the 20th century, would find any recognition of these definitions of "home." Eskimos? South Pacific islanders? Brazilian jungle dwellers? African tribal peoples? Native Americans--from the 6th, 12th, or 18th century? Such people could hardly respond to the mythic structures indicated with any sense of resonance! Children from tower coops in bustling New York City would likely find Heidegger's beloved peasant hut in Bavaria a prime candidate for representing hell. Circumnavigating sailors find "home" on the high seas: Vita Dumas, leaving the turmoils of Argentina felt comfort in returning to the rolling oceans, as did Moitessier as he began his second consecutive circumnavigation, passing the point of turning northward towards "home" to finish the race in England, in favor of sailing on to eventually reach the south Pacific islands.

Another sometimes overlooked flaw in the view of domesticity as a peaceable kingdom was developed, after Bachelard, by Foucault, who rightly noted that not all "homes," reflect anything like "dwelling in the harmonic fourfold."  Rather, many such spaces can be wrenching, disruptive, victimizing and illusory. Prisoners under surveillance are not dwelling, as Erving Goffman's heartbreaking analysis of life in "total institutions"--the military, hospitals, prisons, residential schools, and, indeed, patriarchal families--spells out in his catalog of the defining behaviors and rituals of institutions of 24-hour control.

But this is hardly the place to explore further the range and depths of this detour into Heidegger's work. Nevertheless, if one can get past the uncomfortable echoes of Nazi ideologies of blood and soil (Blud und Boden), it can be instructive to spend some time with Heidegger's texts on this matter--which do go beyond the simple germanic mysticisms of the 19th century.

If I read the European etymology correctly, however, there is a nice irony in the choice of "dwelling" as the core idea of one's thinking about the notion of "home." (This point is my own pure speculation.)

"Dwelling": Old English dwellan "to mislead, deceive," originally "to make a fool of, lead astray," from Proto-Germanic  dwaljanan (cf. Old Norse dvöl "delay,"dvali "sleep;" Middle Dutch dwellen "to stun, make giddy, perplex;" Old High German twellen "to hinder, delay;" Danish dvale "trance, stupor,"dvaelbær "narcotic berry," source of Middle English dwale "nightshade"),from PIE dhwel-, from root dheu- (1) "dust, cloud, vapor, smoke" (and related notions of "defective perception or wits"). Related to Old English gedweola "error, heresy, madness." Sense shifted in Middle English through "hinder, delay," to "linger" (c.1200, as still in phrase to dwell upon), to "make a home" (mid-13c.).   [!]

Perhaps human development from nomadic hunting/gathering societies into animals who communicate, cultivate, and construct in a fixed place (who dwell), is unconsciously portrayed in linguistic changes as the result of a series of errors, mistakes, and confusions.  Born nomads and travelers, the species becomes confused, unhinged  (perhaps by means of herbal drugs and stress), and start to wander in circles, falling into trances, losing their minds, and finally "settling," putting down roots, building permanent shelters, adopting laws--and make themselves "at home"?  Such a hypothesis might shed light on the human desire to travel (think of all those songs about "ramblin'," rolling stones, the billions spent on travel and transport, the horrors of "cabin fever," the punishment in imprisonment and "time-outs," as well as the fascination with space travel, jet-men, star treks, and "cruising."

The astronomical dimension of travel obsession is perhaps an echo of a darker meaning of "home."

"This world is not my home.

I'm just a passin' through.

My treasures are laid up

Somewhere beyond the blue.

The angels beckon me 

From heaven's open door,

And I can't feel at home

In this world anymore."

For millions and millions of people of religious conviction, home=death.
"Goin' home." "God called her home."  Such people see themselves crossing the Jordan, passing into the comfort of sweet death to rock in the bosom of Abraham.

As I said earlier, "I have been homeless for a good part of my life--IF home is staying in a fixed place, a place with a proper natural surround, a basement, an attic, etc.--and if Edgar Guest is right that one must stay there long enough to accumulate a "heap o' livin'," by which he means marriages, births, deaths, illnesses, crises, triumphs, shared epiphanies, gardens kept, generations established. In spite of lacking so many of its "markers," I have always felt "at home," in so many different dwellings and circumstances--trailers, boats, one-level flats, cramped rooms, spacious multi-level villas, garden apartments, urban tenements, alone, in pairs, in groups, en famille.

We are torn, ambivalent, nostalgic, homesick for ..something else...(saudade, sehnsucht, eleutheromania, ecophobia, resfeber), yet we dream always of getting home, when we are "away."  We picture the "cottage small by a waterfall," a fire in the hearth, our loved ones around us, food smells from the kitchen, sturdy shelter from the cold and storm, and rush out to buy the nearest god-awful painting by Thomas Kinkade, choose equally awful greeting cards to lie to each other about our feelings, and put up hundreds of photos on Facebook to make a branding, communal "selfie" depicting the endless series of victories and perfections that have blessed us and our domestic progeny.  On one hand, we fetishize home, by advertising home-cooked, home-made, home-spun, "make yourself at home," "no place like home," and refer to friends as "homeys." On the other hand we speak of an unattractive person as "homely," and are advised by realtors to stage our houses for quick sale, by erasing all "homey" touches, and emphasizing clean, slick, hard, and technological surfaces.  We're told to avoid, "quaint," "cozy," "unusual," in ads and told to talk about stainless steel, granite, and sleek. Perhaps LeCorbusier's definition of a dwelling as a "machine for living" has won the culture wars? Perhaps it is a Freudian fear of animalistic contamination?  Or perhaps it is the longing for a jet or rocket to carry us away (with a suitably re-manufactured partner) to a simpler, faster, joyous, speedy life, without the travails of illness, cleaning, death, schedules, lists, and eternal sameness.  All of this makes for the possibility of a new nostalgia.  Families 40 to 50 years ago, after an evening sitting in front of the TV,  mourned the loss of the family table and hearth, where shared stories brought the brood together. Now families text one another while watching commercial programming on 6 different device screens in separate rooms or vehicles, to mourn the loss of the family gathered around the TV to watch "All In the Family" or "The Ed Sullivan Show."

I grew up listening to "O, give me a home, where the buffalo roam, where the deer and the antelope play," and had no trouble imagining "home on the range."
I chose a life of always moving.  At my retirement ceremony, a colleague and old friend noted that anyone who knew me had learned to enter my name in their address book in pencil, since it changed so often.  Later I synthesized the two poles of home and travel by the not-so-simple solution of living on a boat! Home on the range became home on the waterways.  Like turtles, tortoises and mollusks, we took our home with us, cruising in comfort from port to port to anchorage, snug in the familiar confines of cabin, cockpit, galley, and vee-berth, but blown next day by wind (or diesel engine) to a new town, new people, new seascapes and challenges.  It was the closest I ever got to a solution to this human dilemma.  By suffering the intellectual and physical confines of early life in Kansas and Oklahoma and Indiana, I absorbed the subliminal message that moving always made things better.  And the bonus was a palpable sense of freedom.  "I can always just leave." "Start over."  Much later, Sartre and DeBeauvoir provided the theoretical armature I needed to rationalize these obsessions: consciousness IS freedom.  Even the prisoner chained to a wall can always to some extent recontextualize his plight.

Having a home is then, in my view, nothing more than being embodied.  "I" am all the relationships that bind me to my "surroundings," including those of fantasy, memory, hope, and imagination.  I carry my home in my (extended) body, in a way somewhat analogous to the sailor in his boat.  Having absorbed the efforts, distances, motions required to navigate my house, my neighborhood, my decade, my fellow human beings, I am "at home," thus embodying all those cliches of dwelling peaceably: familiarity, safety, affection, satisfaction, emotional attachment, and sharing--a domain that extends from the erotic to the cosmic and back again.  There may never be anyone truly "homeless" in this sense (though no one denies the tragedy of human beings without shelter--especially in rich, industrial countries.)  Sometimes it is quite enough to have one's "clean, well-lighted place," a "room of one's own," a wild duck in the attic, or a vee-berth after a hard day's sail.

However, there is that lurking shadow of having finished my 70s, and approaching the inevitable end of consciousness, of living.  Death awaits us all. That death is bodily death, so there is no place, no need, for a home after death, though we are sold (by religion, and various death industries) the idea of making ourselves comfortable in our "eternal rest." and have to cope with offers of paying to have eternal Muzak piped into our well-appointed mausoleums.  My eschatology can be summarized by the great philosopher, Rodney Dangerfield: "A girl phoned me the other day and said... 'Come on over, there's nobody home.' I went over. Nobody was home."

So what are we to do before that day?  Keep moving, even if "in place." The grim reaper will always win the race, eventually ("Always at my back I hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near...") But he occasionally stumbles, gets the address wrong, has second thoughts, so I remember that he can't really run that fast with that stupid hoody flopping around his knees, and carrying that heavy and inefficient scythe.  Besides, as the Stoics knew long, long ago: "Where I am, death is not; where death is, I am not."

* * *

Coda: so here I AM, where death is "not yet."  And where I am truly "at home." We have now lived more than ten years in this little haven in Portland; home has manifested itself in deep ways in the feel, views, smells, and familiarities of this house with its hearth and books, its busy kitchen, its gardens built and tended by F., its stairs, offices, and studio, its shop, tools, garages and fencing, its art and computers, its stained glass and music hanging in the air.  It feels like home, perhaps most of all, those cold winter evenings, after a good dinner, when we sit for a few minutes by the fire in the library, almost ready to climb the stairs to bed.  And, again, next morning, when I have started the coffee as first sunlight streams into the kitchen through the giant oak branches next door.  For me, home is a day well-lived with my love, and us in our place at the day's center, as it opens to unknown paths.

Wind & Waves - Body & Mind - Sailing

My mother told me that as a toddler I was afraid of feathers and road grader machines (huge/loud/destructive/yellow). Later, I came to be afraid of Hitler and Tojo (this is '30s and WWII '40s in rural Kansas and Oklahoma), and much more: Satan (blame church 3 times per week), snakes (rattlers), Mrs. Estes (principal of Garfield Grade School), and falling (climbed lots of trees--the only way to get much above 600 feet elevation in my part of Kansas!),  But two fears entailed mythic and prognostic dimensions that I couldn't have guessed then: wind and water.

I was born in Kansas in Dust Bowl days, and saw sky-high walls of dust that blotted out the sky as winds out of Colorado carried away the topsoil, fallen victim to ill-advised farming practices, and giving rise to artworks by the likes of Steinbeck, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Woody Guthrie. One of them stripped most of the paint off cars left out during a noisy orange noon twilight, with dust mounds forming indoors from minuscule cracks under doors. Then there were the tornadoes threatening every spring in those greenish black clouds and ceaseless lightning storms that seemed much more terrible than anything portrayed in Dorothy's Kansas/Oz.  (This terror was permanently imprinted in my psyche when I was rescued from a building totally destroyed by one of the strongest recorded storms of the mid-century, mid-country, which hit my church summer camp near Wichita in 1947, when I was eleven.)

These concrete threats of bodily harm from wind were paralleled by a much more abstract threat and fear: water.  There were, of course, local manifestations--the floods of the Verdigris River, which rose to a position only a couple hundred yards from our house on North Central Street, and inundated parts of the Sinclair Oil Refinery across the street.  But the floods were, for us, benign, quiet, an inconvenience for a couple weeks--a chance to pray for the farmers and gather canned goods for those flooded out.  I took swimming lessons, and liked the chlorine-inflected green water in the pool up by the airport, but paid only perfunctory attention to my parents' stories of drownings, cramps, and the dire consequences of waiting less than two hours after lunch to risk a few laps in the pool.

No, the real fear of water came abstractly--from church!  We learned that full-immersion baptism was a definite work of grace, as a testimony to our salvation and sanctification from God, via Jesus and the Jordan River.  Healing waters. Artesian wells.  Springs in the desert.  Nothing frightening in any of that--though some people in their frayed white clothing coughed and sputtered in alarming ways when lifted upright from the baptismal pool by the frail pastor--resurrection in a bug-eyed public ordeal. But the hymns and scriptures also carried a much, much darker message and threat: the stormy ocean, central trope of literally hundreds of Protestant hymns (perhaps attributable to the role played by ocean trade, militarism, and travel so essential to the management of the British Empire in its 19th century years of religious revivalist exportation.)

There I was, in 1944, an 8 year old worshiper in a hard pew over 500 miles from the nearest salt water beaches in Galveston, and some 1500 miles from oceans west and east, singing my heart out about the "mighty billows" of seas, lost mariners, struggling seamen, lights on the shore,  and so on.

Brightly beams our Father’s mercy,
From His lighthouse evermore,
But to us He gives the keeping
Of the lights along the shore.

• Let the lower lights be burning!
  Send a gleam across the wave!
  Some poor struggling, fainting seaman
  You may rescue, you may save.
• 
  

Without TV, and forbidden by my church to attend movies, I had to imagine a disaster flick of my own, with credits to Treasure Island and The Book of Knowledge, casting myself in the role of heroic boy who saves the girl on the burning deck. In my nightmares I'd fall from the deck into the heaving water, feeling my lungs near bursting as I fought upward towards the lantern light, only to wake coughing like the newly baptized fat lady in the flowered dress.   The imagined fear of the sea was founded, enhanced, expanded, made cosmic, however, in every preacher's hell-fire sermon about damnation: being "Lost," in the sea of my sins, with Christ as my only hope for salvation.  Watery theology as thalassophobia.

By the obscure logic of the unconscious and its needs, you will not be surprised to hear that these twin terrors of my childhood, wind and water, gave birth in my late maturity to my passion for...sailing.  

Indulge me for a moment by imagining a Venn-like diagram of four overlapping/intersecting circles, then label the left and right circles "wind" and "water."  Label the upper circle "philosophy," and the lower one, "making/craft."  If you draw a small sailboat in the central space, you'll have a diagram to illustrate some points I want to make about sailing.  Sailing is for me a satisfying activity that merges philosophy/theory with physical work/praxis. At the same time it is the locus of my intersecting childhood fears (abstract fear of water, concrete fear of wind.)

No, this simplification will never do.  Sailing lives at the junction of so many of mankind's larger defining myths, relying, as it does, on two of Empedocles' four elements (earth, air, fire, water), that he considered the building blocks of all existence.

Sailing is ancient--much older than philosophy, mythically, as well as historically. Insert montage here of stone-age dugout canoes with animal hide sails, Egyptian boats with 30 positions for oars as well as sails, coastal trade ships plying the near-East in the 3rd millenium, BCE, and evidence of workable boats as long as 45,000 years ago.  It is no wonder, then, that every culture contributes to the mythological progeny of this basic techne: Noah and the Flood, Jonah and the Whale, Jesus and the Fishermen's storm, Moses in the Bullrushes boat and parting the Red Sea, the cosmogony of the Enuma Elish creation myth from Babylon (12th century BC), the great flood of the Gilgamesh, and, later, Odysseus's defining struggles with navigation, with departure and return, which provide an armature for substantial portions of western culture and self-definition.  

Leonard Cohen ("Suzanne") opines that "Jesus was a sailor /When he walked upon the water /And he spent a long time watching /From his lonely wooden tower /And when he knew for certain /Only drowning men could see him /He said 'All men will be sailors then /Until the sea shall free them.' "

Some back story: I have owned boats and sailed for something approaching 50 years.  Some were small--dinghies, a Hobie Cat, a PortaBote, inflatables, a little Chrysler daysailor, etc. Others were larger--a Southern Cross 31, a C&C Landfall 35 (Dalliance), and a Hallberg-Rassy Rasmus 35 (Chantey). and our current boat, a 36 year old Bristol 24 (Wayfarer). One, the Southern Cross (Thalia), was our home for the better part of a year and a half in 1991-93.  Ma femme, F., and I lived aboard on the slowest of cruises from Maine to the west coast of Florida and back, anchoring out almost every night, raising innumerable bridges on the Intracoastal Waterway, and sampling seafood restaurants and quiet gunkholes up many of the rivers of the Eastern seaboard.  We, like so many others, had read the classic texts by sailing couples and singlehanders: the Roths, the Pardeys, the Hiscocks, Chichester, Knox-Johnston, Slocum, Moitessier, Graham, Aebi, and other hardy mariners and admired adventurers.  Unlike those listed here, but like so many others with sailing ambitions, we finally never crossed oceans, nor ventured far from terra firma. We were fair-weather sailors, cautious, heading offshore only when it seemed safest and easiest to get to the next intended port.  Oh, there are stories--of groundings, unexpected fog, near collisions, alligators, difficult passages, and so on...but we were rarely in any danger, compared to any ordinary drive on the Interstate, and were always a bit relieved to get the anchor down, set, and think about plans for dinner, whether cooking afloat, or taking the dinghy and bikes ashore to a restaurant.  We gave up plans ten years later to repeat the entire adventure in a larger boat after getting less than 200 miles down the coast, motivated by horrible weather patterns (10" of rain in less than a week, and winds on the nose) along the coast to head home and take a land-based driving vacation to the American Far West (If you are interested in THAT failed seafaring story, my first blog from 2002 is still online. It includes long letters en route describing our (mis)adventures.  It can be found HERE. )

All of which is to say: I was, and still remain,  a lousy sailor.

Why?  There are many reasons: as with skiing, I didn't start early enough; being a teacher with a doctorate, I, perversely, avoided lessons; I never learned to trust the physics of sailing in those cases when my body was giving me messages of danger; I have a vivid imagination of unwanted consequences for errors in judgment, distracted perception, sloppy navigation, possible but unlikely scenarios, and so on.  But under it all there are the remnants of that FEAR derived from childhood religious, mythic, and traumatic elements.  It's all that wind and water. 

So I sail to test my fear a little, and to bring myself back to the center a bit, having taken to heart some lessons from the ancient Greeks.  I was always a questioning child with a head full of "Why?".  Lost in books, checked out by sixes from the Carnegie Public Library in Coffeyville, Kansas, it would have been easy to slip slowly into a life spent "in my head," in philosophy, theory, argument in the university--and at the bars. But growing up on a quasi-farm with chickens, gardens, a cow, rabbits, and possessing a body that seemed to find numerous wanted sensations in sports, sexual activity, and, most of all, making things, I never quite became the intellectual that I sometimes aspired to be. I liked the "How?" as much as the "Why?"  My childhood was full of activities like building my own darkroom using scrap wood, a light bulb, some leftover etched glass, and old fabric to kill the window light.  I made crystal set radios, using WWII surplus earphones to listen to programs coming in on frequencies determined by moving a "cat-whisker" wire around on a piece of mineral.  I built a transmitter and receiver and got my novice license as a "ham radio" operator so I could tap out code messages to other "hams" from around the world, who sent me their QSL cards to confirm contact by means of my little soldered together contraptions.  There were bird houses from my garage "shop," pole-vaulting stands and sand pit, chemistry experiments, soldered tin trinkets, lanyards, skate-wheel carts, crochet and knitting attempts, clay models for new car designs, and endless evenings of shooting hoops with a basketball goal hung on the garage until after dark.

In short, I always suspected that Aristophanes had a point in his satire of Socrates--and all sophists--in The Clouds, with its "Thinkery." and its ridicule of those who go about with their heads in the clouds.  I wanted my head to be occasionally in a real cloud--say, the fog of Casco Bay on a boat that I'd worked on, and coaxed into being as a sailing vehicle by my own physical work.  I wanted to test my ideas about sailing against the realities of the wind and sea, however mildly, and carefully undertaken.

I thought that if I persisted, I'd absorb all that I needed to improve.  I'd watch those 12-year-old kids in sailing prams racing on a cold windy day, popping up and down like whack-a-mole toys, ducking under the boom, hiking out on the leeward rail, effortlessly controlling a boat at the mercy of wind and water, and find myself wishing I'd grown up near an ocean.  These kids were sailors in their bones and instincts, feeling the boat's next move, anticipating the next tack, having absorbed the boat into their virtually expanded bodies, just as I feel how to "shoulder" my way into a tight parallel parking space without thought or calculation.   So, lacking the option of having a different childhood,  I tried to think my way into comfortable skill as a sailor: we read about boat characteristics, sail area to displacement ratios, righting moments of various rig choices, and I got to know our boats stem to stern by becoming more adept in plastics, electronics, plumbing, woodwork, electrical circuits, engine maintenance and repair, and the thousand little challenges of keeping a sailboat seaworthy, as it ages, corrodes, rusts, decays, delaminates, and wears out in the harsh environments of salt air, sea water, extremes of temperature, wind and water force stresses, and unexpected mechanical failures.  Here, I was much more in my element: my childhood of making things, fixing things, learning the "how" of  electronics, woodwork, sewing, and mechanical building gave me a confidence in boat maintenance that I did not have in actual sailing.  Sometimes it seems that my late-life career has been essentially buying good boats, making them a great deal better, and then selling them at a substantial loss!

But this self-mocking assessment overlooks some deeper channels of interpretations.  Why sailing?  Practically, it is suitable for my old, less agile, weaker body--but so are many other ostensibly pleasurable pursuits.  Rather, I think, it is the "poetry" of the thing. Sailing, like a lover's caress, passes over the skin of the sea, leaving no trace, but quietly transporting the participants into unexpected feelings and perceptions. It is the "right" speed for taking in the world.  Like leisurely bicycling, it is fast enough to avoid boredom, slow enough to notice a thousand details we'd miss at 50 mph. In my kind of sailing, there are no heroic ascents (I still hire someone younger and stronger if a bulb needs changing at the top of the mast.)  There is no "Protestant" mythology of  effort required to "deserve" the pleasure of the view--no hike up miles of rocky cliffs to see...other rocky cliffs, from a different angle, no agonizing, drug-assisted ascents as in the mountainous stages of the Tour de France.  There is no substantial risk of breaks, sprains, and concussions, as with skiing.  Unlike poker, fantasy sports, bridge, chess, and such, which entail no outdoor component--no mythic return to the rocking amniotic fluid of the womb--no connection to the deeper mythologies of human culture across the millenia--sailing takes me into nature as a partner and participant, of sorts.  It suits me.  

And it synthesizes that tension I earlier evoked in my imagined Venn diagram--it allows me to recognize myself at the juncture of what I've made and what I fear, what I think and what I do.  Mind and body, theory and praxis, wind and wave. Marx taught us that in the dialectic of Master and Slave, the slave is the ultimate winner: the Master owns the means of production, controls the vast powers of the State, buys the laws needed to keep control, and decides the agenda of the apparatus of control. But, by that very position of assumed superiority, in his lack of equals, his paltry cohort of power-holding moguls, rulers, and CEOs, he finds himself multiply alienated--from others and from his own identity.  He lives in fear of revolt from the superior numbers and strength of the mass of workers he controls. The Slave, on the other hand, does not live in fear of losing what he owns, and moreover, he possesses the keys and tools of all the engines of production. He is skilled.  He is the Maker, the Worker, the productive element of the social whole. And, best of all, he recognizes himself in what he makes, what he is capable of doing and being. Marx says that history is on the side of the workers.

Of course I mean this comparison as a rather silly and grandiose allegory, only.   In my little boat I am nothing approaching a mystical synthesis of human history and personal redemption.  I'm just a slightly nervous near-octogenarian in a plastic hull with a couple large fabric sails and a smile, as we're sailing off the mooring with my love coming back to the cockpit from the bobbing, tilting bow, an osprey there over her right shoulder high up under the quiet clouds. It is enough.