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“Considering the small size of these islands, we feel the more astonished at the number of their aboriginal beings, and at their confined range. Seeing every height crowned with its crater, and the boundaries of most of the lava streams still distinct, we are led to believe that within a period, geologically recent, the unbroken ocean was here spread out. Hence, both in space and time, we seem to be brought somewhat near to that great fact - that mystery of mysteries - the first appearance of new beings on this earth…”
Charles Darwin, Journal
“To sail... to pursue the setting sun, to bend a sheet to sail and harness the wind… to enter the pelagic realm, to cast off the inconsequential and the false… to encounter everything on its’ own terms, unmediated… to greet the welcome arrival of a lone sea bird with all and total concentration…
…This creature… the frigate bird. I see them, wheeling, turning, swooping, and something so insistent calls from my own subconscious… I don’t know what it is… There is an otherness to these creatures, with their form redolent of both bird and man, a suggestion of something else entirely… something that crossed into our world from another… perhaps they wheel about the river Styx, and line the rail as Charon plies his crossing… He occupies my dreams now, this birdman, and brings foreboding… There is fear onboard… trepidation for the voyage ahead… I think this birdman comes with us, and haunts our wake, the brief trace of which marks our own passing as surely and as inexorably as the passage of our vessel through the open ocean.”
“Rapa Nui is one of the most remote inhabited islands in the world. The tiny population on Pitcairn is 1300 miles away, and continental Chile some 2200 miles to the east. To sail away from there is to enter a vast empty ocean, where your vessel is alone. As the Southern latitude rises, so does the weather… low pressure system following high following low in never ending succession… each system taking just a few days to cross the South Pacific from New Zealand to South America.”
“All civilisations end, one way or another... only the myopic and the stupid can gaze complacently out from their own and expect an entirely different outcome. Rome was eternal, the sun would never set on the British Empire, and no doubt the Rapa Nui people expected the towering figures of their ancestors to gaze over a thriving island for a great deal longer than they did. But deforestation, over hunting, the overuse of resources, the destruction of their own environment led to internecine warfare, and the statues were toppled. The ancestors had failed, and betrayed, and birdman had arrived. We too will fail, if we persist in blindness - if we keep taking the blue pill. The corporate construct, with its’ ceaseless torrent, its’ trillions of seconds of advertising lies, day after day, night after night, year after year after year, layer upon layer; this accretion of falsehoods overlays the world as it actually is, and replaces it, creating the conditions for a normalcy which is anything but, where just about everything considered normal is in fact insane, inhuman, inhumane and ecologically catastrophic. How is one supposed to live in this world, to be, to act, when one knows it to be false - to be so out of step with your own civilisation’s apparent aims and desires that you have never once felt any sense of belonging and shared purpose? How many of us feel this way? “Everybody knows the boat is leaking, everybody knows the captain lied” sang Leonard Cohen. Well it is, and they did. The line of towering figures at Tongariki whisper of what they witnessed, and continue to stare from sightless eye sockets over a world that has gone, with a gaze that contains a prophetic warning for us all.”
Sax Impey, 2019
