Magellan's Reveries

Poetry. We spend so much of our lives focused on the common thread of our own experience--often far too eager to unravel the whole fabric into which we've been so exhaustively woven--just to find that single, strong string we can cling to as self. The world is full of such heroic threads, and it makes for a rather unstable tapestry, one at times in tatters. History offers us some basic perspective on the complex art of weaving, but then again it is those single brightly colored strands that we tend to elevate and adulate, those public streams--christened 'talent,' even 'genius'--whose exemplary currents we find so irresistible in our search for what makes each one of us unique.

Magellan was a strong thread, a heroic one. He was, on many levels, self-consumed. Though I have not glossed over any of the unsavory political aspects of his voyage of discovery, I have never judged him. I have merely tried to let the fire of his self-consumption burn until his world was washed with its own ash. The connection between us was already there--water, travel, and Portugal (where I lived for a short but intense period)--all were our shared intimates. As a child, I was fascinated with the great explorers, a fascination that has survived their historical de-coronation in the postcolonial era. A man perched at the bow of a wind-propelled ship headed off into the absolutely unknown--that was enough to spark my imagination then, as a child, and even now, as an adult. It was necessary for me, as I wrote, to become Magellan, just as it was necessary for him, as he wrote through me, to become each wave of the ocean on which he set himself so determinedly adrift. --R. Nemo Hill