I Hear The Mermaids Singing, Each To Each

Every now and then, once in a blue moon, I get the urge to, as Anne-Helene used to say, wash the floors.
I told Jessie on Monday that I thought I would be doing that on Thursday and guess what? I did.

Cleanliness is next to godliness, so they say. And for me, that's the truth.

Think about all the loveliness of a newly bathed baby. Think of the way you feel, clean and freshly toweled off, slipping into clean sheets. Think of the glory of a completely cleaned-up kitchen after a holiday meal or even just a night's supper. Think of how you feel after you swim in the ocean on a hot day and come out and towel off, as if your skin had been reborn.

Clean is just damn good.

And as I sit here smelling my clean floors I am thinking of the Gulf of Mexico and the way its clear, clean water has become fouled and polluted with the dark gushing plumes of oil and how that oil is spreading everywhere and how I don't think that in my lifetime it will ever be the way it was.

Instead of the sweet scent of salt and sun, the beach will now offer us the fumes of petroleum. Instead of the clean water which my grandfather (who lived into his nineties) always claimed was healing and who never washed off while he was on vacation at the beach because of its beneficial effects, we will have nastiness and poison.
Instead of sitting on the shore and looking out at the timeless and endless water as it rolls in and washes out, we will, if we sit on the shore at all, think of the way we have somehow ruined what we had always considered to be the boundless sea, and the mindfuck of that alone is more than I can contemplate.
Instead of the estuaries being a source of life for all living things in the sea, it will be a trap of death.
And just thinking of the impossibly clear water of the Mexican Caribbean being fouled by the oil makes me shudder.

My floors are clean but the sea is filthy.

Look: all oceans are one. If hallucinogenics taught me anything at all, it is that all is one.
My floors are connected to the earth which is connected to the oceans.
My life is connected to all life and the ocean is the mother of that life.

So is your life.
And just as my ocean is in the process of dying, so is yours. Just as my mother is dying, so is yours.

The day is coming to an end. I can take comfort in my clean floors and I do. But behind everything I do and think right now is a giant plume of crude oil, boiling and spreading out into the salt water which is the same as the water a mother's body forms around her baby when she grows it inside her body. And with that thought always with me, there is no real comfort at all.

I am sorry to keep talking about this. I know that there are people who come here from so far away they may not ever really see the effects of this befouling of my own personal ocean. But I think that although they may not ever see it, they can still feel it.
Because all is one.
And we are all connected.
I breathe in, you breathe out. I breathe out, you breathe in.

Look at our planet from space and you realize we should be called Planet Water.
If there is a miracle, it is water. And what have we done? We have shit in it and said, "Oh. Excuse me."
There is no excuse.

But for now, right now, I can go cook supper in my clean kitchen, my feet loving the feel of the clean boards beneath me.

I will take that and some day I will look back on this time before the oil got to my shore, to my water, and I will think of this time, perhaps even this day, as one of the best of my life because it happened before.

T.S. Elliott in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock said

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

And we will drown in the polluted waters of our own endeavor, our own human foolishness.
I do not think the mermaids will be singing for us unless it is a song of curses, unless it is a song of grief.