Journey by Water

In the monumental Prologos, Michael Chapman takes his family on a day trip to the San Francisco Zoo that turns out to be a journey through histories: political, personal and natural. As the family is freighted from Oakland to San Francisco on the ferry Eureka, Chapman thinks back to his Navy days in the Pacific Theater during WWII. References to Melville and Swift reflect his book-buyer obsessions. Is this Palm Sunday destined to bring the Messiah triumphantly into the sacred city? Or will it be yet another baffling journey across the water for discoverers in search of Meaning? (All ellipses are in Bayliss's original text.)

In war that immense naked side of the planet had been humanly occupied - not permanently, not with railroads or housed women, but one meridian or parallel at a time, in knots or yards or footholds - with flying floating crawling instruments of transformed chemical force, legions of steered engines swarming first one way then the other on the most remote flank of the sphere where there were never Canaanites Britons or red Indians to displace, only myriad tons of salt water and a few palm trees. It's the tract of the world in which it's easiest for men to suffer a loosening of centripetality and drop off into eons of black nothingness, to be absolutely missed in action in, for there is nothing on that ocean to cling to, especially at night when you regard stars as the nearest population. You think only your frail bark's tenuous adhesion to brine and the water's own surface tension reinforce weakened gravity in preventing you and ocean itself from being dropped into space for lagging behind the sun. On such campaign it isn't so much your own geotropic mass that binds you to earth as the gravity centered between millions of pairs of legs walking the homeland under hip-swung skirts. Yet there's no love in all those empty inhuman latitudes and longitudes except the heartless vegitative kisses of jellyfish the diabolic storge of giant manta ray madonnas or the infernal affection of gap-lipped sharks; and never a ritual but the pelagic mile-wide courtship of nobles once looked upon by Ishmael but now scattered by envious harpoon guns and suspicious depth-charges. Not one of the coral-wreathed peaks that break the heaving swells of the vast gibbous medium between west and east (otherwise unopposed in months of gathering momentum and even at their brightest calmest blue always longer and higher than the largest whaleboat) would ever have been touched by intellectual beauty if Taji hadn't beached on them....'Land's End' - how presumptuous were the British Isles! ... Even USS Owhyhee anchored a little to windward of Golden Gate with women and children aboard was still lonely for a fully-minded Radio Technician. The history department of an island university couldnt civilize the Western Ocean; nor will our young Constitution. The bamboo-tinkling landfall of Yahoo is a lushly spoiling rock in a freakish clump of money bags full of whistling drunken Wahoo bustle 2000 miles beyond the outer ledge of the last continental shelf at the uttermost end of the whole human universe! When you're living in Tent City on a crowded sand-spit in Pearl Harbor with nothing to do but wait for orders and breathe red dust you feel as betrayed as one of Columbus's sailors even when you turn your back to the sea and lift your eyes up those fronded slopes of hypercalifornian streets and luxurious bungalows knowing that the volcano has been tamed by residential prosperity....