Review: Theory of the Solitary Sailor
Sometimes a particular passage immediately changes a book from a textual object to an emotional ally.
“-the world, it has to be said, had never offered me a warm welcome; without necessarily being a victim or anything, I had always felt ill at ease, surplus to requirements, out of place.” (p16)
The author, Gilles Grelet, is a man who, ‘over a decade ago’ left the city to live permanently on the sea. The book, however, is always disconnected from any archaic sense of the hermit or recluse. Despite its angelic nature, it is hesitantly in conversation with the rotting thing it seeks to sail away from. But this isn’t an academic dialogue in the sense of attack and defense, for as Grelet makes clear “Do not think it is a matter of the sea against the world, quite the opposite: the sea comes before; it is the ante-world.” (p23) In this way, the sea isn’t viewed as an anthropocentric frontier to be conquered, but the void which outlines the world; the sea appears as that which we anxiously attempt to forget, the limitrophe of human reason. And even such borders we may seek to hastily throw beside and atop the sea are little more than absurdities, lifejackets for the academe.
When I think of the sailor, I think of Michel Serres, I think of the helmsman. He who understands that he may never go against the movements of the sea. Despite all his potential skill, one cannot sail against the void of the sea. And as for Serres “Voyaging begins when one burns one’s boats, adventures begin with a shipwreck.”, so for Grelet, “Freedom is a point of departure, not a horizon.” (p29) The sea can never be captured, its position as a void renders the sailor as a tyrant against striation. The beauty of Grelet’s writing (and therein, Mackay and Ireland’s translation), is that upon opening the text one is entered into a subtle, gentle touch of oceanic prose, and so topics and terms such as politics, world, and place are bereft of their usual possessive faculties, left at the shoreline, seen from the position of the solitary. We aren’t sneering at them or sailing away in a panic. No, such actions are looked upon as trinkets, pastimes that keep trying to make themselves present in the face of Grelet’s oceanic Gnosticism.
“Gnostic is the one who says: The world? Not for me. I am in the world, but not of it…I am only passing through. In fact, I’m leaving. See my wings.” (p47) From the position of Grelet, of the sailor, of the solitary itself, an angelism doesn’t necessarily arrive as much as it is revealed. The wings of Grelet’s angels, respective of materialism and gnosis, cooperate against philosophy by gently soaring above it before it has the chance to lay any roots, and where better to avoid such dull foundations than the ocean. The sea wears the gnostic’s search on its sleeve; eternity amidst the waters isn’t concealed, but is ever-present. The sea doesn’t afford but is the infinite silence of gnosis .
I am reminded of another sailor, Donald Crowhurst, whose logbooks were found after disappearing on the sea. In them he stated “Man = [0] – [0]”, for Wouter Kusters “it means that all that man is from beginning to end adds up to nothing.” For Crowhurst the void was an adversary, his white whale; for Grelet the void – with its inherent anti-horizon (non)stance – is already beyond exit; as Grelet states “first of all, this sea itself sails” (p60). The sailor serves the boat and the boat serves the sea and the sea serves itself; to sail is to enter into the immanence of gnosis. And all these lighthouses, and ports, and borders, and constraints, we return to these in moments when things need to be done, when things need to be worked out. But after, and always in thought, is the void of the sea which was before all. We shouldn’t ask ourselves what causes erosion, but in truth, what causes civilization? The sea is; it isn’t taking anything back, for nothing was ever truly against such a void; all it has is time and rhythm.
“Anti-philosophy is not another philosophy, a philosophy that would be ‘human’…but radical independence from philosophy, that is to say sovereign traversal of all philosophy.” (p78)
“To navigate melancholy…” (p78) this could be the only ‘aim’ one could draw from this text, but within this vector is already its own avoidance. This is a book that doesn’t take sovereignty seriously in a human sense, but allows sovereignty to be sovereign. To navigate freedom, as a solitary sailor, well that’s a communication with the wind and sea and rain and sleet. Has this book left the world behind, I’m not sure; would it be welcome within the world? No, but only because it could never be translated to the land-dwellers of philosophy. If this text were to pass the doors of a university, I dare say it would crumble into pieces, and the academic holding it would feel themselves proven right. This book belongs only where it happens to end up.
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Purchase here: https://www.urbanomic.com/book/grelet-solitary-sailor/
(A thank you to Urbanomic for supplying me with a copy of the book)