The Atlantic Shadow
I've been keeping half an eye on the interviews that (Limerick's own) Paul Gleeson and (Canada's own) Tori Holmes have been giving to The Irish Times regarding their (on-going) attempt to row across the Atlantic from The Canary Islands to Antigua.
I'm not much of a rowing (or endurance sport) fan you understand, but the 'shadow' they continually claim to have experienced is very much my cup of supernatural tea.
On the 12th of January 'he' got 'his' first mention:
Tori says I must mention the man. Maybe it's night-time hallucinations but she noticed me looking around a lot on the night shift. I said I had this idea that there was a shadow or something behind me. She said: I have the exact same thing. We have the idea that there's a presence there. Maybe it's a guardian angel or a grandad. Tori is convinced it's a man not a woman. Maybe he'll pick up the oars and give us a hand!1
Then another brief mention on the 19th…
Tori is still interested in this shadow behind us when we row. Now she's convinced she doesn't know who it might be. Maybe she's just starting to go a bit mad!2
…before a much fuller elaboration in today's paper:
There have been an awful lot of people – people we don't know – texting us about the shadow. On Wednesday night – this is really freaky, and I'd be quite sceptical about these things – Tori was out rowing on her first night shift, from eight to 10.
She got this awful feeling – y'know when you feel there's someone standing straight behind you? She said she was too scared to turn around. When she came into the cabin she didn't say anything about this to me.
I was rowing from 10 to 12 and I got this real feeling that there was something behind me. I had shivers down my spine. I turned around and I got a flash of a black pair of pants and a black pair of shoes just on my left-hand side. I was, like: What the hell is this? I came back into the cabin when I was finished and told Tori about this and she went: "Oh my God, I don't believe it!" And then she told me what happened her.
We've got a load of messages. It seems it's well documented with sailors and explorers that they've experienced a sense of someone with them or a guiding presence. I don't know how true it is. Tori thinks it might be her great granduncle Jack Chalmers who sailed across the Atlantic twice.
In the book Touching the Void, by the climber Joe Simpson, he tells of how he felt when he was coming down the mountain that there was a little voice telling him: Get Out! Keep Going! Move! Maybe we're just under so much stress that we're getting spooked, and our senses are getting blurred. But Tori says that when you're out here your senses are heightened.
Peter and Eamonn Kavanagh, who did this in 1997, told us that before we see land we'll smell it. And every sense does seem to be really, really sharp. Tori thinks that maybe our senses are so sharp we're sensing something else, something that if it happened at home you wouldn't be conscious of or think anything of.
Of course we could be just going mad! If it is a guiding force I hope it's a good one. My Dad says that a lot of people in Limerick seem to be taken with this shadow. Yeh, maybe he's that 16th man – Munster's secret weapon!3
As I read today's piece I couldn't help but be reminded of the Fear Liath Mór (Big Grey Man) of Ben Mac Dhui that I mentioned in a previous entry. Like the 'shadow' described above, he too is noted for lurking (unseen) behind isolated people (causing paroxysms of fear), and let's face it…you can't get much more isolated than sitting in a rowing boat in the middle of the Atlantic.
All of this begs the (interesting) question raised by Mr. Gleeson above: Are such experiences merely "figments of the imagination" brought on by extreme solitude, eerie quiet, agoraphobia etc., or, could they actually be (as Ms. Holmes suggests) the products of a 'heightened' sensory awareness incited by just those conditions?
The former hypothesis, while appearing 'common-sensical', seems a very unsatisfactory explanation to me, primarily because it seems to close the door on such experiences in a very prosaic and simplistic manner. The latter explanation, however, is undoubtedly the 'jazzier' of the two, as it suggests that in altered states of consciousness one can experience another 'level of reality' (excuse me for sounding like Carlos Castenada here). Of course, even if the "Black Pants-Wearing Shadow Man of the Atlantic" (as I shall dub him) isn't really real, in the usual 'bricks and mortar' sense, it doesn't mean that the experience isn't significant.
Isolation, after all, is commonly believed (by those of a religious/'spiritual' bent) to be one of the pre-requisites for deep immersion in the inner/other world…and any 'vision' is significant in the sense that at least one human mind experienced it (or believed they did, which really amounts to the same thing).
January 26, 2006
13 responses to The Atlantic Shadow
Sounds like that there boat is infested with Ninjas.
Or, perhaps, the ghost of Mr Miyagi.
Roll on, roll off….
[Guardian - Link]
Well, if it’s ninjas that’s ok, because as everyone knows ninjas are totally sweet.
Apart from scaring me into the middle of next week (from which I’ve just made the arduous backwards journey – it’s not looking good in there by the way), this story reminds me of Gil the Boulderer, the subject of a legendary Jon Krakauer essay, which can be found in the collection Eiger Dreams: Ventures among Men and Mountains.
After training his body to undertake extreme physical activities as a matter almost of automation, perhaps occupying what one might call the limbic mind, Gil’s intellect functioned at a heightened level of awareness.
Anyone who has been running will be aware of the meditative state which aching muscles and lungs seem actively to create once the pain barrier has been breached. It’s a pretty addictive feeling.
Here be ninjas
[Link]
oh sweet jesus – i could feel the breath on my neck as i read it – and i’m at work in an open plan office surrounded by my fellow dilberts.
Strenuous (heart-pumping) exercise can indeed enter one into a ‘meditative state’, and if you throw extreme isolation into the mix then you’ve definitely got a heady brew.
Pity the boffins haven’t got the rowers hooked up to some…em…brain-scanning equipment so they might crunch the numbers and give us a clue to what’s going on.
Pah, what has science to tell us about that which is beyond mortal ken?
You’ve just given me a rather splendid idea for a ‘superhero’.
It’s ‘Mortal Ken’! He lives in a world of immortals and his…em…super power is that he will eventually die…
*cough*
Don’t see Stan Lee flipping out over that pitch fústar…maybe if you try one of the indie publishers.
I guess Mortal Ken would have the power of insight into the human condition, but this is quite a shit power.
He’d also be more inclined to risk his neck, though.
I’d imagine that the society in which he lived (one peopled by immortals) would be a standard Krypton-esque utopia…but the populace would have become (like Wells’ Eloi in The Time Machine) mentally and physically weakened by endless play and leisure.
And even though they won’t ever die of disease or old age, they can still be killed by severe injury…a fact, of course, that makes them excessively cautious and unadventurous.
When a nameless threat arrives to shatter this utopia, who do the immortals call to do the dirty work that they cannot? None other than Mortal Ken! A man whose mortality lends him the vigour to fight, goddamit!
He’s like a 28th century D-Day Dawson…or something…
Now I read over it again, it does seem a tad on the knuckle-dragging, neo-con side…
Still, all the better to sell it to the American market.
Fústar, I think your “mortal Ken” idea has already graced the screen, and with some success might I add. Never heard of “Coronation Street”?
Well given the fact that William Roache (a.k.a. Ken Barlow) has been in Coronation St. for 45 years, a more apt name would surely be ‘Immortal Ken’ (very evocative title for a man who practises druidism too).
Yeah, but he did hook up with the spectacularly bespectacled Deirdreee on numerous occasions – clearly the act of a mortal man for only in death can he find release from his shame.