The Greenpeace Mariners
`Ah, love, let us be true to one another. . (Matthew Arnold in 'Dover Beach') You almost wish they weren't there sometimes, those peace-pirates or Mad Mercyists you can't place either with the terror or the counter-terror, with the violent or the inert; in fact can't place anywhere outside of La Mancha or the Mount of Olives. I swear sometimes I'd rather be left, like Richard in the play, to 'that sweet way I was in to despair', seeing the end coming, seeing five billion of anything nec- essitous as men are couldn't help conquering the world; seeing how history, all unaware, headed for this and it's here - the sea beaches blackened with dead dolphins and pelagic birds; disaster at Bhopal, the Rhine, Chernobyl, the Three-Mile-Island, the Love Canal. . . . Ah love, let us be true to one another. . . Ah, more, even: obsessed, oblivious to the rest that we can't bear!
And still, those ridiculous `far-distant, storm-beaten ships. .
No, not those of old Mahan, looming between the Grande Armee and the dominion of the, world, but little one-lungers that bob on a bilge-pump and a prayer between the harpoons and the whales, and between the ocean itself and a sea-fill, a sewer — and at last between history-as-horror and history as honour. . . Ah, love, what could we, even, promise to one another, if they weren't there?
Peter Kane Dufault
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