PROLOGUE i. Vagabonds & Delinquents
Men of feckless irresponsibility who scorned those with a home, preferring the flat horizons of seas to the cramped cubicles of sedentary living.
They danced in a merry circle and neatly sidestepped whole cohorts that had been bound in chains, generations poisoned and trapped. Bellamy led his crew to slip the chains, spit the poison and vault the trap. The grinding cogs watched in rage; calling them good-for-nothing scum. This was false but the words followed them from docks and taverns, thrown like peelings into the street. Towns called them vagabonds. This was accurate. It called them other things, it sometimes called them worse. On these occasions it revealed more about the town itself than the men.
Tipping his hat to the odious stares, the silent applause, Bellamy caroused: a life lived in equal parts zest and laziness.
“Why if he had wanted us to work he would not have created this wine”
The bottle would be proffered with a wink:
“With a skinful of this, would you rush out to commit economics?”
The crew readily assented, despite fear and hunger never being far at hand. Strength was conserved for wine, talk, and the careful examination of clouds or what trees provided the greatest shade.
There were purveyors of rare services but unfortunately not oft-requested ones, so work remained an issue. Sought after in a world ruled by rabid jackals, picked clean by vultures and shat upon by all those above, Bellamy and his crew dined delicately with the vultures, sidestepped the shit and slipped the bone from the beasts, never forgetting to share with other miscreants along their way.
Believing, to a man, that you couldn’t be truly happy when surrounded by other people’s wretchedness. Bellamy would earnestly intone:
“How can you make merry if those around you are not?”
Mangled cosmic beauties, they refused the well‑worn yoke that ensnared many in daily grind. They looked through you and each other, face to face, bound by a solidarity felt in the bones, forged in wretched sin and tempered in the furnace of shared misery.
Although in their new work, the young ragamuffins of old had discovered, if not peace, at least an ordered chaos that enabled further transgressions and delinquent pleasures.
The world they moved through was shedding its skin, obscenely and in often inconvenient ways. Masks were slipping again. Virtues and graces, those old border markers, the facade of civilisation, melt in manic systems that devour ever-increasing portions of our world. Not mere territory, there’s no new land to claim, no hidden cracks to slip in. Flags are now erect everywhere, sterile masts thrust into the skies across the globe. This means, the new assault will be on the sky itself..
Deterritorialization, as you can’t bomb a social relation. Mutate or destroyed, Beauty is the stripped and the Slop safely regurgitated.
Amongst such homogenous wastes and imploded landscapes did Bellamy and his crew joyfully tread. They too spin chaotically in orbits, but perhaps with a greater beauty. They watched the changes with growing sadness and with the disappointment of discovering water in your wine. Old worlds become smothered in fresh rules and a new brutality, every meeting with native peoples metastasising into figurative, and all too often, literal genocide. The legacy of our modern realm, where solitude and hunger stalk the land, destroying all in their wake.
Autonomous living grows impossible and the world is puréed into mush.
The light grows dark and a look from Bellamy is the cue for Yanez:
“What do we have left to lose?”
Half satyr and half enlightened prophet, Bellamy responds by addressing the whole crew:
“Nothing. This will be a good deed lads and most likely the last one we do!”
Yanez’s wiry frame gesticulates wildly, a reminder of his indulgent heroin days, and clasps the captain’s shoulder:
“Bellamy, to a man we’d lay our lives down for you”
The rest of the crew rumbles in assent and a rare smile cracks Bellamy’s weathered visage:
“Our journey will not be free of hardship, but it shall be filled with joy in defiance, communion in mischief, and a stubborn refusal to abandon the art of living. I will ask only once, whose ship?”
The words barely leave his lips before the question is drowned out by waves of
“Our ship..our ship our ship”.
There is a glimmer in the corner of the captain’s eye as the crew roar on, deaf to the world and singing themselves into legend.
