Francis Bacon
once said, some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and only a few
to be chewed and digested. Harvey Oxenhorn’s book Tuning the Rig is one of that few. It is a book of expedition and
exploration, on the faraway seas of Newfoundland and Greenland, and in himself.
Harvey took on a journey on the Regina
Maris, an old sailing vessel, to watch and study whales in the Arctic. The
book is about that unique, and life-transforming experience. When I first
picked up the book, I was not very enthusiastic. No need to be convinced of
wild life protection; neither am I interested in ships or sailing. But as I
went on, the book engaged, and absorbed. Yes, there is an environmentalist
argument in it, though presented subtly; yes, lots of accounts on the
nitty-gritty details of daily routines on the Regina, but with a purpose. Most important of all, the book is
meditative. There are moments when Harvey stood alone on the deck, facing the
immense and quiet sea, he contemplated the meanings of life, and living. Such
as this one:
What in the world was I doing here? Why
was I standing in sleet in the middle of nowhere at one in the morning? What
was I trying to find out or prove? … It had always been this way; maybe that
was why I had no “bright hall” to dream of coming back to. I had made a botch
of it; I had failed to find, or at any rate to keep, my hearth back home.
Indeed, it was from this emptiness, this absence, that I was fleeing. Yet
nothing could feel emptier than the prospect at which I now stared. … All I
could think to answer was no answer, the Buddhists’ “noble truth,” that life is
suffering. You feel it as our prow divides the wet black world in half: Time’s
fabric splits, then mends astern.
Beautiful,
isn’t it? Harvey, after all, was a poet. He had a special eye to capture beauty
and elegance, even in the most routine and trivial things. Take this one, as he
observed one of his shipmates’ measuring with a sextant in his hand at 3am:
To see him standing there, against the
vacant sky, is to be reminded just how small and how impermanent we are. And to
admire all the more the way his feet are planted, the dignity in his unturned
face, his hands controlled and quiet, his mind the same. He is not posturing,
not even thinking of himself. Yet as he aims and reads the instruments, he is
aligning himself, literally, with stars.
But I should
not use “even” here; I should use “because.” This is the lesson Harvey learned.
In the epigraph, he cited James Clerk Maxwell’s words “the object of knowledge
is relation.” On a ship, on the high seas, unity was the key for survival.
Everyone, even inexperienced Harvey, needed to chipped in, and strictly
followed the daily routines to guarantee the safe sailing of the vessel. People
were so interdependent in this special environment that the spirit was written
into the sub-consciousness. The word “routine” had a profound meaning for
Harvey:
“Routine: derived from ‘route,’ a line
of pilgrimage or travel.” How widely must one travel, and how far afield, to
discover the value of the word? No matter. To believe in the journey is to have
already arrived. And to surrender to the long haul, willingly, is to take it
and make it your own.
To take the
haul willingly, but also tactfully. Hervey further reflected:
When I first came on board, I thought
that the whole world owned me. I was ready to make music, damn it. I was
disappointed, angry that so little in my life would stay in tune. But tonight,
as I barely heard the sounds we made before they were blown astern, I
understood such disappointment to be arrogance.
It is arrogance to expect that our life
always be music. It is false pride to demand to know the score. Harmony, like a
following breeze at sea, is the exception. In a world where most things wind
up broken or lost, our lot is to tack and tune.
To lower the
self-ego, to accept limitations and failures, to always ready to adjust, is the
secret of a full life.
Five years
after the journey, Harvey wrote in the epilogue, aptly titled “Home,” as
follows:
I am of a generation often faulted for
preoccupation with the self and an inability to make or keep commitments. From
childhood we were relentlessly exhorted to make ourselves special – to achieve,
achieve, achieve. Beneath that impulse (and the style of education it inspired)
lay the assumption that the way to be a complete and successful human being is
to cast your own net ever wider, to leave your individual mark upon more and
more.
What many of us are coming to understand
is that this way of living has enormous costs. We are perpetually spread too
thin, fragmented, scattered. As we strain to hold together more and more, we
bring less and less of ourselves to each spinning moment. In the manic pursuit
of gaining and becoming, what is lost is the capacity for simply being: with each other, with nature,
with ourselves. Not surprisingly, when we think of freedom, we locate it
outside our daily round. We define it as escape.
What I discovered abroad Regina is that we have it backward.
Freedom, Hegel said, is recognition of necessity. In exercising self-restraint,
in accepting the kinds of limits that I had previously squandered so much
energy evading, I experienced a sense of purpose and a kind of solidarity I’d
never known before. I had gone far off to bring what mattered closer – gone to
sea and come back feeling grounded – relieved of the burden of specialness,
reprieved from the lonely ego, released but also reengaged.
It took Harvey
another three years to publish the book. Shortly after, sadly, he died from a
car accident. I am glad that in his short life, he had this transformative
experience on Regina and was able to
share that experience, with his humble and revelative reflections, with us.
That is his legacy; his spirit of living and being will continue to
resonate.
