The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.It is the night sea journey, the lone fisherman on a tropical sea with his nets, and you let these nets down - sometimes, something tears through them that leaves them in shreds and you just row for shore, and put your head under your bed and pray. At other times what slips through are the minutiae, the minnows of this ichthyological metaphor of idea chasing.But, sometimes, you can actually bring home something that is food, food for the human community that we can sustain ourselves on and go forward.
This is the story of a boy named Pete Coutinho, who had a spell put on him. Some people might have called it a curse. I don't know. It depends on a lot of things, on whether you've got gipsy blood, like old Beatriz Sousa, who learned a lot about magic from the wild gitana tribe in the mountains beyond Lisbon, and whether you're satisfied with a fisherman's life in Cabrillo.Not that a fisherman's life is a bad one, far from it. By day you go out in the boats that rock smoothly across the blue Gulf waters, and at night you can listen to music and drink wine at the Shore Haven or the Castle or any of the other taverns on Front Street. What more do you want? What more is there?And what does any sensible man, or any sensible boy, want with that sorcerous sort of glamor that can make everything incredibly bright and shining, deepening colors till they hurt, while wild music swings down from stars that have turned strange and alive? Pete shouldn't have wanted that, I suppose, but he did, and probably that's why there happened to him - what did happen. And the trouble began long before the actual magic started working.("Before I Wake...")
Break, break, break,On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!And I would that my tongue could utterThe thoughts that arise in me.O, well for the fisherman's boy,That he shouts with his sister at play!O, well for the sailor lad,That he sings in his boat on the bay!And the stately ships go onTo their haven under the hill;But O for the touch of a vanished hand,And the sound of a voice that is still!Break, break, break,At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!But the tender grace of a day that is deadWill never come back to me.