On killing an albatross . . .

Posted on ManuelPosted in Excerpts

An excerpt from my book, In the Land of Fires . . .

“With my cross-bow,

I shot the albatross.”

 Why anyone would want to hurt one of those beautiful, elegant flying creatures, was beyond me, but I’m sure many had over the years and like Coleridge’s ancient Mariner, lived to regret it: by being becalmed in the middle of the pacific and suffering from thirst, or perhaps by having to live with a bloody stain in their soul and the burden of taking an innocent life, in their conscience.

“Day after day, day after day,

We stuck, nor breath nor motion;

As idle as a painted ship

Upon a painted ocean.

 

Water, water, every where,

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, every where,

Nor any drop to drink.”

 Most people I know have never read the poem, but at one time or another have most likely heard references to “Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink,” only they probably didn’t realize they were catching the punishment phase: one of the many consequences of killing the albatross.

I’m not going to tell the rest of the story, but I will say it goes hard for the ship crew. There is a lesson here I think, and not just for mariners. One of them is that the ability to do something is not in itself reason to do it. And I’m not talking about shooting a bird to keep from starving, I’m talking about shooting one for the hell of it, for the meanness of it, for the chance to watch it plummet from the sky in agony and die.

How many times in history did a country invade another because it could? Or a powerful nation enslave a weaker one for the same reason. Even a small act like stealing a bicycle, because no one was looking and the thief thought he could get away with it, is comparable. To my thinking, opportunity and ability are often mismatched with brains. In other words, too much opportunity, too much ability, sadly, not enough brains.

Which may be the answer to the question of why the Mariner chose to do what he did in the first place. After all, he had many other options: he could have gotten pen and paper and sketch the bird, or made a beautiful watercolor, showing the bird in all its majesty, or wrote a poem about it, or the easiest one of all: ignored it. But no, he chose to get his cross-bow and shoot it.

I’m not going to go as far as to say it was a crime, which in my book would have been, had it been premeditated. No, I think it was worse than that: he shot the albatross without thought, without even a wayward brainwave, by being stupid, with no understanding or even a sense of what he was doing.

 

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