American film poster for 1939 film Island of Lost Men: photo by Paramount Pictures, 1939; image by Centpacrr, 27 November 2011
He was a detainee on that island plantation where sleep was not permitted for three long years until one night he learnt to slip out of the identity of the one it was his keepers presumed they were detaining and so knit the ravelled sleeve of care and sipped of the cup of peace perhaps but in any case as if miraculously had vanished by morning from the desolate cloud-murk-enclosed isle of the damned -- or so the story those exhausted and hopeless men gather every evening to tell again among themselves, clutching at its improbable story line as if grasping for a frail straw of hope secreted therein, or maybe a stray shred of something like a meaning, or even, for that matter, a fragmentary scrap of half-remembered, blurred, ancient, half-waking, forever incomprehensible dream-image, there, in the ill-lit stilt huts beneath the sodden dripping foliage of the thick forest canopy of the island of lost men, goes.
Palafito house: photo by Peter & Jackie Main, 30 October 2002
Without revealing any spoilers, perhaps it will help to relate that behind the sad fate of every inmate of this curséd isle lies something unusually nefarious.
ReplyDeleteTom,
ReplyDelete"I bet it WAS something unusually nefarious" --- "as if grasping for . . . a fragmentary scrap of half-remembered, blurred. . ."
2.26
light coming into sky above still black
plane of ridge, birds beginning to call
in foreground, wave sounding in channel
arranged on the same branch,
a series of paintings
made thus it may seem, what
is “to be,” “present”
sunlight reflected in windblown channel,
shadowed green canyon of ridge above it
Center of Somewhere
ReplyDelete1. Sandwich Island Somewhere
2. Sandwich Island Answer
3. Interested Party
Dilly dally.
Shilly shally.
Depths.
4. Sandwich Island Answer, Part 2
(Nome Nugget)
5. Nome Nincompoops
6. Non-Fiction Nome
7. Hello Goodbye Nome
8. Soviet Nome
9. Schurz Water babies
(Trying to make friends) Wovoka
[Wichita, Bridgewater, Roseburg, Columbia, Nome, Schurz, Canton, Reno, Missoula, Tettnang, Polson, Sutherlin] Eugene, (Delta) Boulder, (Lake Forest) Barstow, (Fairbanks) Waimanalo, Kailua, Meersburg, Pahoa
On the Island of Lost Everybody, every day is a pop quiz, every pencil eraser contemplatively-chewed-over, every answer both false and true.
ReplyDeleteI once knew teachers who were in the habit of awarding the grade of Incomplete. Never could understand that. Thought it always went without saying.
"... a fragmentary scrap, half-remembered, buried..."
Tom,
ReplyDeleteA reel-stunning tour-de-force but this “Isle of Lost Men” cannot be so lost after all, as you—in your favorite role of intrepid explorer of lost souls—so cleverly managed to uncover its whereabouts within the vast Isla Utuba archipelago, a location hitherto known to only 114 native inmates of this insular state.
Every morning's head count, a new drama.
ReplyDeleteToday, 112.
115--the little beggar stole 3 hits.
ReplyDelete