There, in the night—the quiet. Where the sea feels forever and exists independently of you.  Your boat moves softly beneath you. It feels too small, and you feel too fragile against the enormous dark. In this moment, you are not someone’s anything. You are only the moment before the fall. Suspended, forever. Here, again. You, brushing the corners of distance.  Your shape at the edge of a nerve. Nothing. It is Nothing but the Miraculous. This is the image that returns to me often. A body, a boat, the forever. A gesture toward the infinite that ends in disappearance. Long before I knew what it meant to disappear, someone else had already done it. Not metaphorically. Entirely. This was the Dutch artist, Bas Jan Ader.  On July 9th, a half-century ago this year, for the second part in the triptych of his final work, In Search of the Miraculous, Bas Jan Ader attempted a solo transatlantic voyage in a small sailboat. He vanished.  Then we turned him into myth.