My Grandfather always appeared to me to hold some kind of insight into what I thought was a beautiful, evasive truth. I felt cheated by him at times, as if there was always something he was not telling me. I remember noticing in his stories a sensitivity towards something, which I myself sensed, but found, was never really talked about. I was a young child, certainly unable to question him on the matter, or request a more extensive elaboration of what was of interest to me. Instead I was captivated by him and found nothing more exciting than catching a glimpse in his stories of the sensitivity that I recognised, sympathised with, and longed to develop. Perhaps for this reason I perceived him as the most interesting human being that I knew of. It wasn’t so much that I thought he had a fully developed sensitivity for what I only vaguely sensed during particular moments, it was more just that I felt he had over time collected similar passing sensations to the ones I recognised. But these sensations were not passing for me, rather they were intermittent and would resonate profoundly and continually at the root everything I experienced and everything I remembered.

As I remember now, and you must forgive me if since his passing I have let my memory of him inflate itself and change form, but I am beginning to see ways in which he was talking more about what I wanted him to talk about, than I could hear at the time. Perhaps this owes itself to the difference between hearing or seeing something from reading it, or re-reading it. Perhaps it is in the process of remembering his stories that I have accidentally inserted new, artificial traces of this sensitivity to an evasive truth. But I like to think that it was always present, resounding in his words. Only, I needed to have his stories written, and to re-read them, as I so often do now with my memory of them. So much so that sometimes I feel as though they were my own experiences and I am merely recalling my own past.

My Grandfather worked on a cargo ship, which meant that he was constantly between cities, in-between continents. The ship was built to transport irregular cargo, or single contracted deliveries meaning that shipments were never on a specific route that was traced and re traced (as is the way with container ship routes these days). His ship and crew would travel from one job to wherever the next necessary job might be, meaning that they never had even a particular sea or passage that became particularly familiar, or comfortable. For the crew, he said, the ship itself became a peculiar kind of grounding in the world. What was most distinct during the largest part of his life was a constant, irregular motion. My Grandfather told me how he had started work on the ship as an alternative to furthering his education. He was of a reasonably privileged family and had the opportunity to attend a university, but described a certain restlessness in his youth that meant he looked for a job as opposed to continuing life in his small, all too familiar hometown.
He never spoke too much about his role on the ship. Rather his stories always seemed to centre around the constant journey that was his working life on that one same boat, all the way until his relatively early retirement.

His stories always started and finished on the ship. At first I had found this irritating, I was always eager to hear about foreign lands and far off places but he seemed to favour the ship itself and all the time spent in its cabins and on its decks. Over the course of his time living in our home before his death I encountered countless descriptions of that ship, which largely made up his remembrances of the most part of his life. I feel as though during that time I was able to re-construct the ship for myself. I was able to stare from its cabin windows into the ocean, or pace down the narrow corridors and watch the way they would twist ever so slightly in rough seas.

He would also speak occasionally of port cities that they docked at, or of his time spent on land. But he always did so as if he was remembering dreams, always describing some kind of old image or set of images. He would not recall for me time on land in the same way that he did time on the ship, his descriptions of these images almost never included any sort of attachment or personal impression which might have formed and lodged itself in his memory of the place. For me, at that time, it made no sense that he would dwell so stubbornly on what I saw as just an inbetween to his times at exciting and often new port locations. I had been on an aeroplane twice before I met my grandfather, and although the airports and flights excited me, I felt that his manner of re-telling would be as if I was to produce more elaborate and developed recollections of the time spent in terminals and aeroplane cabins than to describe the impressions I had formed and taken away from my visits and destinations.

I learnt of time passed on the ship, without television, without public radio broadcast, without even newsprint or magazines collected from ports. He did describe, however, a vast library that was well maintained by the crew, so large in fact that there are specific works of literature which my grandfather would still recall with an air of disappointment in not having had the chance to remove from the library and begin to read. Also in the library he described a small wooden chest of drawers, which housed a small collection of exotic board games that the captain had slowly acquired and made available to the rest of the crew. I imagine he must have spent a lot of time engaged in the playing of such games, however this was seldom described in his recollections. After all, how do you remember long periods of deliberation with a sense of time contained intact? Perhaps no more than you can accurately remember boredom. For whatever reason, that small library made large by its collection was intricately referenced in my own memory, despite its relatively infrequent and fleeting appearances in my grandfather’s descriptions of the ship. I had no doubt assembled it for myself from its various mentions, more so even than I had for the rest of the ship. The library’s regular appearance in dreams formed for me strong familiarity with it. Although, in those dreams its contents and features were always changing and being re-formed.

Recently I had one such dream, in which the library appeared. I knew that the library contained games, but this time a game filled out the library to the extent that its capacity was immeasurable. It was a room without walls as is only really conceivable in dreams. It was similar to a video game, in which the playing space has no outer limit, only a regenerating landscape of graphics, and endless artificial topography. It was perhaps one of the most terrifying dreams I can distinctly recall. The next closest thing to that being a series of recurring dreams I encountered in childhood, in which there were in fact no describable features. I have attempted to recall to friends such dreams, although without exception these are inadequate recollections. They supply only a reduction of the actual memorable experience into a collection of attempted descriptions of new sensations, which are not resembled in bodily sensations. Many friends have identified with such dreams, and all that I know of can sympathise with a certain inability to adequately recall or describe them. On occasion I’ll taste a component of these dreams or smell their familiar odour. Such sensations cause a significant discomfort while also managing to stimulate an irreducibly strong desire. It feels as though I have some other extension from my being, like an additional limb. But a limb that has almost no feeling, to the extent that it is largely forgotten. Let us say that every so often, (with the example of the experience of such dreams, or in the recollection or taste of them) this limb becomes apparent through an excruciating pain. But at the same time that pain lends strength to what seems a vital but disused organ.

On a recent journey, I awoke in my aeroplane seat with the feeling I had just been dreaming in the described manner. This discomfort was enhanced by the extreme fatigue partnered with unquenchable restlessness I was experiencing physically, as is sometimes the case with airline seats. Inspired by my grandfather, or out of envy for his journeys on the ship, I had been determined to maintain a constant awareness of the vast surface of oceans below over which I was passing. This determination had come from a frustration with modern vessels, aeroplanes and flights, which I believed alienates the traveller from the most crucial aspects of the trip. Aside from the change of surroundings upon arrival, I had found that the journeys themselves would become encapsulated in no more than a symbol or expression of ‘journey’, which is largely manifested in the airport or aircraft cabin if they are in fact at all different. To relieve my discomfort, I devoted myself to the task of staring out of the small aeroplane window, which, in its frustrating spot to the side of my face, meant I had to turn my neck and shoulders into an uncomfortable position. I attempted to account for every cloud that we passed over, and to catch sight of the ocean with its barely perceivable crawl. No matter how strenuously I attempted to do so, I could not imagine myself on the surface of the sea, moving slowly and more intimately across the earth. Nor could I really imagine at that moment a place on the ship, an impression of which my grandfather had so distinctly imparted into me. All I could do was identify with the imagery before me. I knew the ocean had a particular name and that it so effectively separated chunks of land infested with cities and organisms. Little else.

This only intensified my discomfort which was still sounding throughout my body as if the dream I had just emerged from was continuing through sound while I was awake. I fixed my vision on the porous line that makes up the horizon. I found comfort in applying myself to the task of attempting to gain a sense of flight direction, but the plain of ocean below me offered no reference to what was ‘north’ or ‘west’. What happened was quite remarkable. I started to see a striking resemblance between the horizon as a visual symbol, and the words ‘north’ and ‘west’ (which at base imply something like direction). In both the horizon and these words, I watched my perception of things disassembled into a collection of vague expressions. Then I remembered my Grandfather’s ship, and its library. It had for me encompassed what a journey was, even amidst the dissatisfaction that came from the immediate one. I found that it dispelled my panic without my even noticing it, and soon I was sitting, captivated by the formations of clouds.