1675: A song of the sees
From The Little Book of Fitzartur Foibles
Once upon a sigh of weather there floated a grand Frigate, painted apple‑green with a figurehead of a duck wearing laurels, owned—or so the papers claimed—by the Duke of Mallard, who was in turn owned by his creditors, who were in turn owned by their daydreams. The sea tolerated them all with weary politeness.
The Frigate, whose name was often mispronounced by passing gulls, had decided one morning (or what it took for morning; ships keep their own hours) to sing of duration. Not to measure it—no, clocks were for people afraid of eternity—but to opine upon it as one might gossip over a fence.
“Duration,” hummed the Frigate, “is the sound after the cannon stops. It is the echo that pretends to be a promise!” And since no one on deck listened—sailors have notoriously poor ears for philosophy—the Frigate sang louder, so that even the barnacles blushed awake.
From below came the clinking harpsichord used by Mr. Pribble, the ship’s resident musician, who composed airs about nonexistent kingdoms. His latest, The Clock‑Mender’s Widow, had been banned by some Committee of Angels for being too likely to induce nostalgia. He accompanied the Frigate without knowing he did, for ships have a way of using men’s hands unwittingly.
“I quite agree,” squeaked a passing sea‑horse, who was in fact a gust of wind with delusions of grandeur. “Duration is that perpetual supper at which Time forgets to serve the pudding.”
The sea, overhearing, decided to contribute a proverb of its own—sea always wants to be clever. It murmured, “When you stop sailing, you stop staying.”
The Frigate thought this profound, if a trifle moist.
Somewhere in the hold slept a crate of porcelain saints, copies of St. Chronos the Obliging, whose legend told that he once lent his hourglass to a shepherd so the man’s lover might arrive on time, only for the lover to spill the sand and invent indecision. Sailors swore the tiny statues whispered tick‑tick lullabies after moonrise.
“Duration,” sang the Frigate, “is the wobble in a god’s handwriting.” Bells echoed approval.
At dusk, as the horizon practiced blushing, a mermaid in patent coral surfaced and shouted a riddle: “What is longer than the sea, louder than silence, and shorter than memory?” The Frigate, pleased to be addressed personally, answered, “My owner’s attention span.” The mermaid clapped, called it correct, and dove off in laughter.
The Duke of Mallard himself—who was technically in London and officially at prayer—felt a brief and unexplained yearning to apologise to someone nautical. Such things travel faster than correspondence.
Later that same never‑night, a mist settled—a gentle bureaucrat of weather stamping everything ‘Temporarily Permanent.’ The Frigate, unable to see where it had been or meant to be, declared, “So this must be duration’s wardrobe: endless fog with last season’s despair.”
“Sing again,” urged the ropes, wriggling for rhythm. So the Frigate sang in the old style, part psalm, part tavern tune, part question mark. Sailors swore they heard the refrain “Forever is merely a stage direction.” The surgeon, who dabbled in metaphysics between amputations, noted the melody had twelve bars too few and an excess of faith.
Critics are eternal, even at sea.
Now, in those days, it was the custom for fine ships to keep diaries, but few could spell. This one preferred to scrawl in currents. Passing fish sometimes read the lines backward and sighed. “Ah,” they said, “another autobiographical current pretending to be a tide.”
The moon, too, sent unsigned letters by reflection. On one such night—documented in the Journal of Maritime Anomalies by a Reverend Peascod—she wrote across the waves, ‘My dear Frigate, stop trying to arrive. It ruins the genre.’
Even the stars, those powdered witnesses, blinked agreement.
Then came a lull so absolute that time itself yawned and nearly slept overboard. The sails drooped; the compass lost its appetite. The Frigate felt an odd weight, not of cannon or cargo but of thought becoming sentimental.
“Perhaps,” it whispered to its own timbers, “duration is me, imagining I continue while being repainted.” It liked this immensely. Ships do adore self‑reference. It is how they stay afloat.
To celebrate the insight, the Frigate ordered up from its dreams a small ensemble: winds playing glass flutes, dolphins tapping snare drums with their tails, and clouds crooning the basso part. They performed The Ballad of the Leaking Minute, a tune reportedly stolen from the future, and all present agreed it was “catchy, in a metaphysical way.”
The next morning, though there was disagreement about whether any real dawn occurred, everyone aboard looked slightly older, as if the song had drawn interest on their youth. The purser blamed humidity; the chaplain blamed verse.
At noon, the gulls recited lines from the Fables of Sir Celandine, an obscure epic about a gentleman who counted hours like pearls and lost every one in admiration. The Frigate approved. “Counting,” it huffed, “is just begging for duration to be disappointed.”
And so it resolved to believe—quite sincerely, for sincerity is only proof of rehearsal—that duration is the conversation between motion and perfume: one lingers, the other travels; both pretend to lead.
Thereafter, whenever it passed through strange latitudes, it offered this belief to the winds in payment for safe conduct. Some winds accepted, others preferred coin, but all remembered the tone. When gales later boasted of their education, they always quoted the green Frigate’s theory, mixing it with gossip about sirens and debt.
Scholars, years on, argued whether the tale implied consciousness, or only charm. A ballad circulated, The Ship That Would Not Arrive, often sung at taverns where the clock hands had gone on strike. Its refrain—reported differently depending on who was too drunk to notice—ended somewhere around, “I last as long as listening.”
It suited the Frigate, which continues, if endings may be said to continue at all, humming through seas that alternate between fact and hearsay, polished nightly by its own echo, faithful to the notion that arrival is an ungenerous idea.
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