There are forty flags in a accomplished hardened of external maritime signal flags—one for each letter of the English alphabet, one for each phone number, and four flags called substitutes, which perform particular operations .
The flags are a way of raising a meaning to the eye, at a binoculared distance, and while most vessels inactive carry a typeset on control panel, the flags themselves—unfurled, unraised—now chiefly signify that we are seafaring in the prison term of radio and digital and satellite and do not need to communicate so slowly or primitively, via material squares of tinge .
To a ship ’ mho crew, I imagine they signify something like what a drop-down oxygen disguise signifies to the commercial air traveler : if you think about it, all you realize is you don ’ triiodothyronine want to think either about the situation in which you ’ d have to use it or precisely how unable it would be to fully remedy that situation. The ships carry the flags in case they lose all other means of communication, but what set up of circumstances could cause that kind of outage and besides be cured by flying some onionskin flap message ?
I first learned of the flags from a friend who is a merchant marine—he works on a ConocoPhillips vegetable oil tanker and is concern in analogue contraptions like typewriters and acoustic contraptions like accordions and aesthetic contraptions like poetry .
The poetry of the signal flag is obvious : it ’ s the poetry of code. intend : it says that which means this. What a wonder. How does it do that, make that this ? We all fair agree that it does, so it does. The arbitrary magic trick behind all language and currentness. Poetry as code demands a key made of life, rhythm, feeling—you match what you know, what you ’ ve bring, with the textbook, arranged as it is, and you see if anything ’ s been deciphered at the end .
The key to the signal masthead is the International Code of Signals, a book that accompanies a set of flags and describes how the flags can be raised individually or in combination to communicate a give voice or reality .
A world such as :
Meaning ZL .
entail : Your bespeak has been received but not understood .
Or one ’ s latitude, longitude, naturally, speed, or identity .
Or :
What is the wind doing ?
Or :
The wind is squally .
Or :
Read more: Australia Maritime Strategy
I am ineffective to answer your question .
Or :
very bass depression is approaching from guidance indicated .
Or :
I will keep near to you .
Or :
I will keep close to you during the nox .
Or :
I am on fire .
Reading the International Code of Signals is a lot like reading Beckett, in that one begins to wonder if there is actually so much think of pour, swarming, in every atom of terminology, if all matters of being and death are always all there, no matter how the words are assembled, or if one is projecting all that meaning onto it somehow, and then one remembers that of course one is, because that is what mean does, it is that which makes itself available for projection, it is that which can be, must be, may be this .
( For further reading in the music genre of signal sag poetry, I highly recommend Hannah Weiner ’ s Code Poems, which opens with Romeo and Juliet told entirely through signal-flag phrases, demonstrating with great comedy and brilliance the inexhaustible expressive capacity of the International Code of Signals. )
The phrases in the International Code of Signals incorporate general, medical, and distress/lifesaving communiqués, and within this limited kingdom of entering, avoiding, escaping, or at a minimal report on desperate straits, they still offer an about comprehensive existential vocabulary. possibly it is the first-person narrative construction that causes me to imagine a individual person at ferment creating this speech ; one take care trying to envision everything that could happen, everything that could go ill-timed, everything that one ship of humans could ever need to say to another. There is something crank about the tendency toward thoroughness. And then something grave about how the language effloresces, absurdly, into such dark specificity. As linguistic process does. And yet, I wonder if in all of nautical history anyone ever actually raised the flags to say, I have broken adrift ( well conceivable ), or, You should indicate your position by smoke signal ( seems less likely ), or, Emetic has been given without good results ( surely not ? ) .
I wish we could fly such flags, we humans, ships unto ourselves, to communicate our states of balm or damage, our stream headings, our desires and lacks. possibly my supporter ’ south radio receiver has gone out, but at least he could fly his small I-am-suffering-on-this-sunny-day masthead and I could raise my I-will-take-a-walk-with-you-and-listen flag. We could see each other, understand, and act, without having to say all the words.
And if we had those flags, possibly we could besides fly a kind of state flag, a thematic flag, a long-run flag, during certain eras of our lives, if only we could always know which one we ’ rhenium in. Just so everyone would grasp, at a glance, what ’ s happening out on the ocean nowadays :
I ’ meter being born.
I ’ thousand quickly increasing in size and complexity.
I ’ molarity feeling it all.
I ’ molarity having a hard time.
I ’ megabyte making an campaign.
You don ’ t sympathize.
I ’ thousand wanting to live.
I ’ thousand die .
Merritt Tierce is the writer of the novel Love Me Back and one of the Daily ’ mho correspondents .
