SAMOA Not SAMO with Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny: The View from Vaea.

Often from great pain comes inconceivable beauty and prolific art.

I wanted to finish some other notes about RLS, not restless leg syndrome, but I am tapping away like a fiend. But I've been sidetracked for the last few weeks and missing this escape of writing and reading and traveling to far off lands in my mind. I was getting restless. But now I feel good and things are settling down.

Robert Louis Stevenson died at 44, after a prolific, but also sickly existence. Born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1850 you probably wouldn’t guess he’s buried in the south Pacific on the island of Samoa on a mountain bluff. His story is not the same old shit SAMO. Resting 472 m above the capital Apia, on Mount Vaea, carefully watching over and observing life in Samoa as he did for the last few years of his life. Appropriate for such a gifted writer, Stevenson wrote his epitaph, a south Pacific Spoon River Anthology entry for certain:

Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie.

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be;

Home is the sailor, home from sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

I not only admire how RLS lived and his works, but how he died much more so:

On 3 December 1894, Stevenson was talking to his wife and straining to open a bottle of wine when he suddenly exclaimed, "What's that?", asked his wife "does my face look strange?", and collapsed.[2] He died within a few hours, at the age of 44, probably of a stroke or brain hemorrhage. -Wikipedia again

If there is any way I can go, this would be it. To take one last look at my wife’s beautiful face and eyes piercing me with warmth and love, knowing that I served her needs at my final moment. She deserves that and so much more. And I’m sure we’d be opening a pretty nice red blend cab-syrah crossover from Paso Robles, which is always delicious and so fitting for me – two grapes, glorious alone and forbidden to be together, not meant to be, but when they come together its magical! Breaking the rules and status quo, finding something greater than the sum of their parts. Hopefully RLS was able to have a taste of that wine and toast his wife before the lights went out. Or perhaps it was the second or third bottle of the night, even better. Seems often we don’t get all the details we would like to, for that is something I would like to know. Or perhaps I am just more delusional and perverse than I realize. Or that my therapists say I am.

Knowing Stevenson's wife Fanny, strong and resolute. Her Samoan name was Aolele meaning Flying Cloud. Her ashes are buried next to her husband on top of Mount Vaea.

Stevenson said this, a good friend I am still seeking even though I know I am with my true companion and Fanny:

“Men are born with various manias: from my earliest childhood, it was mine to make a plaything of imaginary series of events; and as soon as I was able to write, I became a good friend to the paper maker”

Moving on, prolific is a grand word, and I mention that because a life of 44 years could be thought of as only getting started or just kicking into high gear. That is how I view my life, or hopefully and optimistically do view with restless excitement and tension in my legs, throughout my body. But for RLS, and it wasn’t his legs that were restless, more like the mind and the hands writing feverishly with a constant tick, he completed over 700,000 words just in his just under three years in Samoa. All in all, over a 20-year career, he produced 58 works spanning tens of thousands of pages and double-digit volumes – more than the Encyclopedia Brittanica (inclusive of 13 novels, 5 essays or travel-related collections, 4 short stories, 4 works of poetry, 3 plays, 3 essays, and 5 incomplete works).

https://stevensonmuseum.org/robert-louis-stevenson/the-works/

And the pile of works is not just massive, it is very broad and diverse, where he covered essays, travel writing, short stories, novels, romances, poetry, plays and biography, also composed music.

Treasure Island was a great escape for me, and I thought I would always find treasure in life but the life itself and the moment I was in was always far greater than any treasure. I should have treasured it more and hope to do so now and beyond. Or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – nothing could fit better than this, getting caught up in my own mind and delusions. But there are so many more works of his, and his experiences that are far more grand. The wanderer, the explorer, the escaper perhaps, and fighting for the underdog on the island of Samoa, trying to even the playing field against a large imperial force. Treasure Island – a bipolar message with a contradictory cast - not heeding the advice you receive or letting what you hear invade your mind and cloud your judgement. Long John Silver the disloyal, trusting, conniving antagonist, whose greed and strength, rational calm and weakness physical and mental are on display throughout the book. He is also the model from which all of us see as a pirate, peg-leg to parrot.

When Jim Hawkins was told to keep a lookout for a one-legged seafaring man, the old sailor Billy Bones had infected his mind. In the end, that one-legged seafaring man Long John Silver is both a real-life haunt and sleeping nightmare to Jim. Their relationship at the center of the novel, covers admiration, envy, pity, disgust, hate and mutual admiration, symbiosis. For Silver’s plot of mutiny and two-faced words clash with completing the mission of finding riches. The relationship between Silver and Jim is a complex one along with the twists of the story of Treasure Island.

A two-faced pirate, good to his core but troubled as well.

I never thought of Jennifer Aniston for her sage words, until I came across this randomly as I was reading up on RLS. And perhaps the explorer, the wanderer, the artist in RLS was all working to make up for the physical pain he was in. Maybe we can find something along these same lines.

“You gotta resurrect the deep pain within you and give it a place to live that’s not within your body. Let it live in art. Let it live in writing. Let it live in music. Let it be devoured by building brighter connections. Your body is not a coffin for pain to be buried in. Put it somewhere else.” -Jennifer Aniston

Robert Louis Stevenson’s best works came as he was bedridden in the late 1880s: Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, A Child’s Garden of Verses, Underwoods; and through the coldest winter in the New York Adirondacks, many of his greatest essays and his desire to change course for the south Pacific came to his mind. And by 1889, he and his family arrived to Samoa. He saw in the Samoan islands the same native overtaking by colonial powers as he did in Hawaii and his native Scotland and Ireland.

For it was not until he reached Samoa that he and his family felt the meaning of the word home: gypsy wanderers no more. He lived out the few remaining years of his life on Samoa where his writing took a significant turn. He experienced in Samoa a poignant change of focus, from romance to realism, with the struggles he viewed impacting him in a way that previous visions did not. In The Ebb-Tide (1894) he wrote of imperialism folly and local incompetence, in our modern-day society which could not be more different, the basic themes are unchanged over time and place. Perhaps we are all just more deadbeats marooned in an island port, like Papeete.

Samoa is now independent, but there is a very interesting back-story to the island chain in the South Pacific. A colony of Germany from 1899 to 1915, then British and New Zealand administration until 1962 and independence. First inhabited some 3500 years ago, I guess Jesus was late to their party, Samoa and its native people was first visited by European and American trade and whaling ships in the 1700s. From sailors seeking supplies, to then hiring Samoans as their crew, to missionary work on the island, the scope of European and American influence grew immensely in the 1800s. As Robert Louis Stephenson wrote, a fierce battle over Samoa ensued between the United States, Germany and Britain (A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa – 1892), along with a civil war, all based on growing commercial and strategic interest. As the situation escalated in 1889, with all three countries sending warships to the islands, mother nature again prevailed, with a major storm damaging anyone’s chance of conquering Samoa. But wars typically have sequels or more, with a second civil war and continued three-way-tug-of-war between the colonial countries and local tribes, ensuing until 1900 when the islands were divvied up. From there the Eastern islands are known to this day as American Samoa, and the western islands changed hands between the British, New Zealand, and Germans prior to independence. The rainy season in Samoa is between November and March, the exact opposite of Puerto Rico. Oh the two sides of the earth and of ourselves.

Stephenson died very differently than how he lived, quickly and painlessly of a cerebral hemorrhage. His gravestone has two sides, like Jekyll and Hyde, one side written by himself and the other by the Samoan people.

He lies where he longed to be, an observer of humanity, looking for his next story or a character in a fictional tale that emulates reality before his eyes. For fiction, quite often reflects small subtle truths, with our minds winding a slightly different path. Our viewed reality the water’s surface hitting the sand, the ideas created as each wave crashes into shore and bubbles up the fictional twists day after day, as the tide comes in and then recedes. Stirring up and exposing so much from beneath the surface, coming into view only for an instant.

https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2015/julyaugust/feature/treasure-island-author-robert-louis-stevenson-was-sickly-man-robu#:~:text=Stevenson%20had%20many%20occasions%20to,problems%20and%20spitting%20up%20blood.

Jimmy Buffett, The Southern Cross (originally by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, but for me it will always be a Buffett song and I will always be a pirate explorer):

Got out of town on a boat for the southern islands On a reach before a following sea We were making for the trades on the outside And the downhill run to Papeete

Off the wind on this heading lie the Marquesas We got eighty feet of waterline nicely making way In a noisy bar in Avalon I tried to call you But on the midnight watch I realized why twice you ran away

Think about how many times I have fallen Spirits are using me, larger voices calling What heaven brought you and me cannot be forgotten I have been around the world Looking for that woman girl Who knows love can endure And you know it will. And you know it will.

When you see the southern cross for the first time You understand just why you came this way Cause the truth you might be running from is so small But its as big as the promise, the promise of a coming day

And I'm heading all the way, my dreams are dying And my love is an anchor tied to you, tied with a silver chain I have my ship and all her flags are a-flying She is all I have left and music is her name

So we cheated and we tried and we tested And we never failed to fail, it was the easiest thing to do You will survive being bested Somebody strong comes along, makes me forget, forget about loving you And the southern cross

Buffett in Anguilla: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5mxPZbmZnc