Cosmos mariners
Commenter “Stan McQueen” wrote on the Conrad Aiken thread:
I was especially touched by the inscription of “Cosmos Mariner-Destination Unknown” on his tombstone, which is in the shape of a bench.. He saw a ship by that name and looked it up in the port logs and found the notation “Destination Unknown”. He apparently likened that ship to himself.
I found that intriguing, too. Here’s the tombstone, which can be found in Savannah, Georgia, Aiken’s birthplace:
“Cosmos Mariner”—I like it, although I’m not so sure that most of us have either the tools or the charts. Have we lost our ability to steer? Did we ever have it?
We sat on that bench/tombstone in the Bonaventure Cemetery which overlooks the Wilmington River, when we visited Savannah a few years ago. If you’ve never been to Savannah read Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil. It will make you want to visit this amazing historic city.
Poetic but uncomfortable for me. His soul is floundering out there, perhaps directionless.
Was Aiken an atheist?
His family had nothing to do with the establishment of Aiken, SC. His parents were yankees who moved to Savannah well after war’s end .
I’m with you Frog…amazing gifts but to sense no destiny beyond this life…I find that sad.
Yes. Poetic and sad.
Before birth you were of the cosmos. After death, should your soul survive, you will either be in some sort of afterlife or part of the cosmos again. Of the two states only the transition between is to be feared, and that only for an inch of time.
The epitaph reminds me of an episode title from the Space Battleship Yamato series: “Our Destination Is the Sea of Stars”.
Abrahamic Covenant, your seed will be as the stars.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfoKKndC9AI
NASA won’t even point a 747 telescope at the moon, and the stars don’t look quite right either under optical zooms. They look closer to protein cells, which is also why distributed calculation algorithms are used to identify human protein and now exo planets from University of Geneva.
I discovered the novel COSMOS by Witold Gombrowicz when I was 17, and it later proved a bi hit when I was 42 and somehow ended up passing books to an 18 year old, Amyjane, known as “the most beautiful girl in the downtown scene,” who was delighted by the novel and then passed it on to Summer, Kari, Zia and others in that circle who hung out at the X-Ray Café. Amyjane was the girlfriend of Courtney Taylor, leader of the band the Dandy Warols. She was supposedly the only girl to ever break his heart, and according to some is the subject of the hit song “Not If You Were the Last Junkie On Earth.”
This is probably her: https://www.google.com/search?q=M/V+Cosmos+Mariner&client=tablet-android-efun&prmd=ivn&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjD_8DArabVAhVixlQKHYsyARgQ_AUICSgB&biw=1366&bih=768#imgrc=DhCqWKSJd3h2uM:
Looking at Scott’s photo of the Cosmos Mariner, and contemplating that name, I’m wryly guessing it’s all a cover for a CIA activity. That’s the kind of thing they’d do, like naming an Asian airline Air America.
And ode to trump?…
“I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert… near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
The History Behind The Cosmos Mariner “destination unknown”.
the image of the grave is here
http://i2.wp.com/www.sailingthecosmos.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/IMG_1169.jpg?resize=1024%2C765
The absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco has “Prier le Je Ne Sais Qui. J’espé¨re Jesus-Christ” (“Pray to the I Don’t Know Who. Jesus Christ, I hope.”)” https://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=1640