Gone Fishing in the Vera
All at sea, the heart scans for truth
At latitudes few would brook,
Till, tired of cruising, it retreats upstairs to a booth,
Takes receiver off the hook
Or tethers itself to a deafening earpiece! Sacrifice
Of truth for freedom or freedom for truth¹ won’t suffice
For real adventurers who rate truth as highly as freedom,
Staying receptive to the era,
Linking it to their desire to track down life’s sense and pabulum -
These choose to sail in the Vera.
They trust the issues of life to her sole arbitration,
And find its rationale in a voluntary term of probation.
All Veranauts learn to fish the deep with the rod,
To sail out of sight of land,
From the luminous and persuasive nature of their catch to win nod
Or wink from the rest of the band,
Each to authenticate his morality; and the crew who viewed
Are open to all proper doubt and to feeding the multitude.
Relativists sneer at idealizing this life at sea;
But the mutual testimony serves
To typify truth and the freedom one finds in integrity,
That no bookish scepticism preserves:
Their lie shapes the one truth that all can believe,
That to be free is to test the truth against life, and heave.²
¹ In Stanza 7 of Nihilism Rules, OK? the phrase ‘ship of fools’ represents sailing as an end in itself and not in the sense of seeking a safe arrival in heaven owing to their nihilistic or hedonistic self-preoccupation. But the Veranauts in this poem are latitudinarian religious truth-seekers who resist the temptation either to disregard all messages from the outside world or to bind themselves
to an oft-repeated dogma. For the dogmatists lose their freedom to think; the free-wheeling isolationists any chance of verifying their truth.