We were drunk somewhere in the Bahamas staring into our fishless wake from the tower of my dad’s boat when he announced that he had something to share with me. A theory of sorts. An idea he’d been contemplating for a long time. He took a moment to set the auto-pilot, then, with a gravitas that bordered on sobriety, he pronounced three words: “Keep moving east.”
“Is that where the fish are?” I asked.
“No,” he replied. “Well, maybe.” But that wasn’t important. His point, he explained, had to do with longitude and latitude.
Lines of longitude (the vertical ones) intersect each other at the earth’s Poles, the effect being that if you travel far enough north you’ll end up headed south. And vice versa. But lines of latitude work differently altogether. They’re basically an infinite series of concentric circles, the largest of which is the Equator. And since they’re parallel, you can travel east or west along any one of them forever.
That nuance hadn’t occurred to me before. I admitted as much. “But what’s your point?”
And this is where my dad’s otherwise simple cartographical observation turned philosophical. See, in his model the North and South Poles represent life’s extremes. All the classic dualisms: asceticism versus excess, godlessness versus zeal, appeasement versus belligerence. The kinds of extremes which, all religions agree, mankind ought to avoid. In other words, steer clear of the Poles. Hug the Equator, and just keep heading east or west.
Well, east, actually. Because it turns out there are metaphysical problems with west. To travel west is, after all, to run against the rotation of the earth – against the flow of time itself. Not a good policy when you’re trying to achieve endlessness.
Trouble is, you can only travel east forever if you bear perfectly east. A fraction of a degree north or the slightest tack south will, compounded over eternity, set your course so wildly aslant that you’ll spin out of control like a lopsided dreidel and end up in flux between those two dreadful Poles.
Still, no one’s perfect; everyone veers off course from time to time. And that’s okay. What’s important is that we’re always correcting our headings, always counterpoising our deviations. If we’re going to adhere to an exclusively eastern course – if we’re going to go on traveling forever – we must stamp out the waywardness in our lives.
“You see,” concluded my dad, “it’s like samsara, the Golden Mean, the straight-and-narrow-path, one-with-the-Earth, all that stuff distilled into a single, simple concept. You just go east.”
Shortly thereafter something disrupted our conversation. A lure snagged in a weed line, maybe. Or I had to scramble down the ladder for fresh beers. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a fish.
We all possess certain memories that are more vivid than the rest. Memories of a higher order. They stand out in stark relief against a life’s worth of lesser recollections; they flare up in our minds spontaneously, when we taste toothpaste in the morning or smell coffee brewing at work. They splice their way into our dreams and spray-paint graffiti on our psyches.
They’re often images: a rope swing you played on as a child, your wife’s face the night you met her, the hospital room where your mother spent her last hours. Existential encounters.
Less often they’re words. Conversations you had. Secrets whispered too loudly. Answers from the catechism you memorized when you were young and pious and gullible.
Sublime as they were, I have to make a conscious effort to recall my surroundings that day in the Bahamas. I can remember sipping diesel fumes and inhaling goombay punch, pitching and rolling across a limitless sapphire that everyone kept calling water. We were trolling for monsters. And I can remember dusk, when a giant skyborn ember plunged into the sapphire and exploded into a sky-full of broken teeth that everyone kept calling stars. They smiled while we slept.
These things I can remember. But it’s three words that I do remember.
Keep moving east. It’s not wisdom, exactly. It’s an answer from a beatnik catechism. A kind of bastard horse-sense born of a seafarer’s boredom and a hippie’s delirium. By itself it doesn’t mean a lot.
But it means a lot to me.