Ships in the Night

Living in Southampton, where big ships constantly come and go, we sometimes hear the booming of foghorns in the night; they make an eerie basso profondo accompaniment to the mewling and hooting of the owls that hunt in the copse beyond our back garden. You can't help but wonder, half asleep, where these slow global voyagers are headed, or arriving from, as they cautiously navigate a misty Southampton Water.

The expression "ships that pass in the night" is obviously rather less figurative when you live near a major port. But for those unfamiliar with it, Wiktionary defines it as "Two or more people who encounter one another in a transitory, incidental manner and whose relationship is without lasting significance; two or more people who almost encounter one another, but do not do so." That's quite a lot of words to explain one now rather hackneyed image, which would suggest that it is nonetheless still doing its expressive work effectively. [1]

It also strikes me as the definition of two rather different things. You might well say of some brief liaison, however intimate or important at the time, "We were just ships that passed in the night" (not so much "Strangers in the Night" as "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight", perhaps). But how often do you find out (or care) that you had almost met someone, but didn't? I mean, how would you even know that the young man sat next to you on the train to London was your best friend's daughter's partner, or some up and coming young poet whose work you had been reading about just yesterday?

It can happen, though. I remember being at a workshop with gallerists Zelda Cheatle and Sue Davies when it emerged that Zelda had been hanging around on certain Greek islands in the summer of 1973, as had I. There were not many places to spend time on the smaller islands in those days – just the one bar on Ios, I seem to recall – so we could easily have been sitting at adjacent tables all evening and never so much as said "hello". Mind you, such places did seem made for remarkable encounters. It was on Mylopotas beach on Ios – in those days an undeveloped haven for backpacking blow-ins – that I was sitting self-consciously naked in the sand with my travelling companion – de rigueur on that beach at that time – when another couple from our home-town of Stevenage happened to come traipsing along the tideline, the bearded male half draped in a long red dress borrowed from his companion, due to severe sunburn. You tended to take that sort of coincidence for granted, back then: "synchronicity spoken here", and all that [2].

Similarly, as I described in a previous post (By the Tide of Humber), poet Angela Leighton and I are exact contemporaries, born in February 1954 [3], and we both happened to study English at Oxford in the years 1973-76. Our paths may well have crossed many times, but as it is we were at most "two or more people who almost encounter one another, but do not do so". Clearly, such notional non-encounters have no significance at all; they are, by definition, "unknown unknowns", close-but-not-quite coincidences of time and place. They do very occasionally become the subject of retrospective speculation, as in this case, but generally only because the other person was or has become well-known enough – famous even – for the waymarks and calendar of their life-story to have become public property. One party is a big ship, setting out on a favourable tide and headed for somewhere remarkable, and the other is some much smaller craft, bobbing along anonymously in the dark.

But enough with the nautical metaphors! I was put in mind of "ships in the night" when photographer Dragan Novacović was kind enough to comment on a recent post here. Dragan's name rang a bell, and I realised I'd seen some of his photographs of Britain in the late 1970s before, perhaps in one of the Café Royal Books. Looking through his work online, it struck me that many of the locations and even individual characters in his "street" photographs of London's East End echoed remarkably closely those to be seen in the photographs of Markéta Luskačová, who was active in exactly the same area in those exact same years. I remarked that he and Markéta must have been tripping over each other at times. Dragan replied:

As a matter of fact I did see Marketa once. One day in the Brick Lane Market I was standing at a crowded stall when I spotted right opposite me a young woman in a white dress with something looking to me like Japanese letters on the back, snapping away with her silver chrome Leica. Out of curiosity, with my own camera hanging idly around my neck and begging to be used, I merely watched her for a while and, having no idea who she was, I finally moved on.

Some forty years later I visited Marketa's website and when I saw her portrait something rang a bell. I wrote to her, describing the incident and the dress (as it turned out, it was a gift from a well-known Japanese photographer whose name escapes me), and asking whether it was her that I saw. In her reply she confirmed my guess and asked whether by any chance I had any photos of her from that day to send her. I felt like kicking myself. Oh, well...

Like ships that pass in the night, as you might say: although, in this case somewhere in between "two or more people who encounter one another in a transitory, incidental manner and whose relationship is without lasting significance" and "two or more people who almost encounter one another, but do not do so". Rather like the the time my 11-year-old son saw one of his heroes, naturalist and broadcaster Chris Packham, in our local camera store, but firmly resisted my urging to go up and say "hello". [4]

I'm intrigued by the hint of extra dimensions given by that "or more" in Wiktionary's definition, though. Who knows who else with a photographic connection or some other claim on our attention might have been in Brick Lane Market on that same day? Or on Ios in summer 1973, for that matter? But then, how could you ever know? This "time and place" variant of "only connect" is essentially a speculative game, and imaginary or retrospectively-constructed close encounters without significance, resonance, or outcome are not really connections at all.

There are, of course, other connection games to play that don't depend on the elements of simultaneity and, um ...; remarkably, it seems English lacks a word for "in the same place". Cospatiality? Whatever, there is the game generally known as "six degrees of separation", as anticipated as early as 1927 in the song, "I've Danced with a Man, Who's Danced with a Girl, Who's Danced with the Prince of Wales". Or, more interesting, there is the chain or "genealogy" of artistic influence, as laid out by Tom Phillips, for example, who taught Brian Eno, and was himself taught by Frank Auerbach, whose teacher was David Bomburg, who was taught by Walter Sickert, himself taught by Whistler and Edgar Degas, mentored by Ingres, and so on in an unbroken line that leads back to Giulio Romano of Mantua and from him to Raphael. Very cool. But, when it comes to "ships in the night", another well-known phrase or saying comes to mind: a miss is as good as a mile. Nobody cares!

It reminds me of a joke my father used to tell.

Private 1: I bumped into that General Monty bloke yesterday, and he spoke to me!

Private 2: Cor, what did he say?

Private 1: He said, "Get out of my fucking way, soldier!"

Ships that pass in the afternoon...

1. Apparently it's originally from a poem by Longfellow ("The Theologian's Tale"):

Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing,
Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness;
So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another,
Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.

2. See Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

3. Aquarius with Scorpio rising, since you ask.

4. Probably the wisest choice, actually, as Chris has since declared himself to be mildly autistic (Asperger's), and might easily have been thrown by such an unanticipated encounter with a young fan.