Pyrotechnics

Reality has been our drug of choice. Let us wake.

Let us open our eyes and see the corpse over which we have kept watch.

Let piracy provide the wake-up call.

We look out beyond the Somali coast and see young black desperate men creating fear and being killed. We see air pirates, sky jackers, through the ever present murk of airport regulations: shoes off, liquids measured, random searches. We see the phishing kidnap of identities, creations of mind and heart.

This we see. This we get.

We see that piracy surrounds us, near and far, in space and time.

From Somalia to waters off USA coasts, from here and now to the earliest documentation of piracy that appeared in the 13th century B.C., piracy happens.

Many pirate incidents in history are familiar to us. We recall St. Patrick's enslaving capture by Irish pirates. We know Blackbeard, Sister Ping and Jean Lafitte. And we imagine Captain Hook, Davy Jones, and Jolly Roger.

My favorite story is the capture of Julius Caesar in 75 B.C. by Cilician pirates who asked for a ransom of 20 talents of gold. Caesar suggested they ask for 50. They did, and got it. Then Caesar raised a fleet, pursued the pirates, captured them, and killed them all.

So let us dare to eat a peach. Let us beg the mermaids that sing each to each to sing to me, so that we can hear, collectively.

The word pirate comes from the Greek word meaning to attempt or to experience. Let us attempt to experience deeply, to pirate the real passionately, to know beyond the whimper nemesis that T.S. Eliot predicted. Sleepers, awake!

We who have forgotten the etymological origin of the concept of pirate have come to define this word of madness and mystery in terms of merely somnolent limitation. But even in this anesthetized limitation hides an essential core of fire waiting to explode.

The essence of piracy is action that spits out defiant defense of its perceived illegitimacy. It accomplishes this defense by rubbing the collapse of defined ownership in the face of the demarcated rational other. Because the other owes its existence to this very demarcation, there is incendiary response. Worry about an Obama brand of socialism, or even a Marxist brand of commutarianism seems silly in the face of this real treachery.

After all, to whom belong the waters of the high seas? To whom belong the whimsy and surreality that is gift of sirens and muses? How can what has never been owned be stolen? Who would agree to punish Prometheus for gifting fire? Who would declare that eagles eat out his liver day by day, never ceasing?

And who would do the stealing? Where are the gods who with the glee of children gone amok, under the influence of the lord of the flies, would play into reality the existence of national boundaries and patents only subsequently to defile them at whim?

Who could forget the true boundarylessness of the sacred spaces that exist only to remind us that nothing less than the whole is holy? That nothing less than the whole is worthy of the complete devotion that we exist to give and to receive?

Only the pirate can create such pyrotechnics. And we are pirate, all. We are all creators of improbable lines and destroyers of them. We are all mad and wonder full and ferocious. We are all essentially uncapturable hunters and hunted, haunted and haunting, creators and destroyers. We are wholly play, into and out of our minds.

When our own pirate voices wake us, we find ourselves in the rewritten love song of J. Alfred Prufrock, lingering in the chambers of the sea by sea girls wreathed in

sea weed, awake, magically not

drowned.

Our pirate pyrotechnics light up a new whirled. We are finders of deathless luck in the see. We are lover, beloved, loving: Pirates, all.

— Rx is the FloridaW eekly muse who hopes t o inspire profound mutiny in all those w ho care to read. Our Rx may be wearing a pirate cloak of in visibility, bu t emanating fr om within this shadow is hope that r eaders will f eel free to respond. Who kno ws: You may even inspire the muse. Mak e contact if you dare.