The Same River

I have mentioned before on this blog a favorite poem, "The Voyage to Secrecy," by the Scots poet Norman Cameron. Late in my Navy career, I printed a copy of it and placed it deep inside my wallet.

The Voyage to Secrecy

The morn of his departure, men could say
‘Either by such a way or such a way,’
And, a week later, still, by plotting out
The course of all the roadways round about,
‘In these some score of places he may be.’
How many days the voyage to secrecy?
Always the milestones by the road hark back
To whence he came, and those in idleness
Can bound his range with map and compasses.

When shall their compasses strain wide and crack,
And alien milestones, with strange figures,
Baffle the sagest of geographers?


The destination that Cameron seeks isn't physical or even terrestrial. There are no more nowheres, no more uncharted lands. The earth has been hammered down, and although there are still plenty of hard-to-reach places, there is nowhere left where one can truly hide, not to be found.

At some time in the mid-1990s, after leaving the Navy, I replaced Cameron's poem in my wallet with the English lyrics by Norman Gimbel of a song originally written in Portuguese by Chico Barque. Antonio Carlos Jobim supplied the song's languorously lovely music.

Song Of The Sabiá

I'll go back, I know now that I'll go back,
That my place is there and there it will always be,
There where I can hear the song of the sabiá.
I'll go back, I know now that I'll go back.

I will lie in the shadow of a palm
That's no longer there.
And pick a flower that doesn't grow,
And may be some one's love will speed the night,
The lonely unwanted night
That may bring me to the new day.

I'll go back, I know now that I'll go back.
They won't in vain,
All the plans I made to deceive myself,
All the roads I made just to lose myself,
All the love I made to forget myself,
Those mistakes I made just to find myself.

I'll go back, I know now that I'll go back,
That my place is there and there it will always be,
There where I can hear the song of the sabiá
Of the sabiá.

Is the writer of the song talking about an actual place or is he talking about the past - a past self? What both writers were tacitly pointing out is that their goals are equally unattainable. Secrecy is as elusive as the past.


Both of these pieces, secret messages to myself, express a great longing - the first, to lose myself, the second, to find something that was lost. Having to be "present and accounted for" in the Navy for eight years, mostly in places and among people I didn't like, made me want to lose myself somewhere, it didn't matter where, I couldn't be found. My returning to active duty for three years in the Army couldn't have turned out worse. I did it to save my marriage and found myself, when I got out, in a failed marriage that was more like a crypt for two. Shortly after joining the Army, I realized my mistake and wanted to go back, back to the very beginning.

I accomplished both when I came to live in the Philippines ten years ago: while going back to a place from my past, I somehow found myself about as thoroughly lost as it's possible to be. I live on a small island, one of the archipelago of more than 7,000 islands in the Philippines. Looking at a map of the country, it looks sort of like the skeletal remains of a hominid. There is the skull, represented by the northern island is Luzon, the elongated arms are the islands of Palawan and Negros-Cebu. Mindanao is the pelvis, and the islands of Samar and Leyte are its spine. I live somewhere along the hominid's lower ribcage.

But I've gone too far. Finding my way back may take too long, but I have to try. It was Heraclitus who wrote that one cannot step into the same river twice, and Thomas Wolfe who wrote "You can't go home again." Everything is in flux, change is inescapable, nothing remains as it was.

But it isn't as simple as this. Physics can't explain why we can't maneuver in time as freely as we travel through space. They argue that, just as Anchorage, Alaska continues to exist a decade after I left it, and I can return to it (if only I had the wherewithal), so, too, the past continues to exist and awaits our return. The life of Anchorage has continued without me. Much will have changed since I left. For one big reason - my sister is no longer living there. She died in October 2016. Without her there, I have no real reason to return.

But the past remains as it was - perhaps not exactly as we remember it because memory is selective. It remains as we first experienced it, alive and dynamic. Will we one day prove Heraclitus wrong and step into the same old river that we once crossed?