Sea

There is a narrow tunnel through the sea buckthorn — ‘the prickly path’ as my grandson calls it — before we emerge on the crest of the dunes and, always suddenly, the sweeping expanse of the shore and that unfailing gasp of the spirit as we take in the oncoming swell of the sea and, caught in the morning sun, the silver sabre flash of the waves as they gather and spill in the wide arc of the bay. I feel like flinging my arms out and singing (as I once did in the echoing acoustic of Leeds Town Hall) the resounding opening chorus of Vaughan Williams’s ‘Sea Symphony’, to the words of Walt Whitman, ‘Behold, the sea itself…’ Or shouting, ‘Thalassa. Thalassa! / the Sea, the Sea!’ as did, in Xenophon’s account, the Greek soldiers returning from battle with the Persians when they came over the mountain pass and caught sight of the Black Sea and their way home.

Behold, the sea itself…

The sea goes about its own business, driven by gravity and friction, while we invest it with a whole cargo of suggestion and possibility. It invites my granddaughter to skitter down the steep dune, flinging off her trainers, and scamper headlong into it. It releases a sense of freedom and wonder, the desire almost to be borne away by it, to be subsumed in it. We find in it the imagery for our moods, feelings and fantasies.

The tide turning

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In a former life, south of the border, I used to walk through the Washlands, where the waters were still, often stagnant — small lakes where gravel pits used to be, little runnels and pools glimpsed through the reeds and spindly branches of young birch and willow. The nearest thing to a breaking wave was the thunderous weir on a bend of the River Calder. It was in this edgeland scene that I found in the shadowy reflections of quiet ponds metaphors for the ambiguities of my own reflections and memories.

Washland Reflection

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I now have the sea, for me still an exciting new environment, an elemental other. And I still cannot grasp how the sea hangs together! In all its fluid surging and swelling it yet has a skin holding it all in, like liquid flint, perpetually mobile. Its flux and flow becomes an image for the incessant swirling stream of evolution — which includes every individual human life. The sage, Heraclitus, said, ‘You never step in the same river twice.’ The same can be said of the sea — the brine you next step in has already changed and re-formed itself, and so have you.

The sea embodies the conundrum of evolutionary time. The billions of Earth years in which continents have shifted and the sea has been rising and falling, its tides ebbing and flowing to the rhythm of the sun and moon….and yet, within that eternity, the unceasing present, that riddle where we try to catch the moment only to find it has gone. When exactly does the wave break, when does its present turn to past? I was reflecting on this one day while sitting on the beach.

Her Funtime Book

On the white sand, my granddaughter
lying with her Funtime book,
and her mother behind sunglasses
reading, and then her mother under a parasol
dreaming. And I think of my mother, paddling
in the shallows, her skirt hitched up…..

In this heat and sleep it’s hard to grasp,
when also in the picture is the gull’s steel eye
feeding its ancient appetite, and
the thrift pink again on the sea-wall,
and that white shell lodged in centuries of rock.

So I watch this child,
the latest wave lapping her feet,
joining up the dots in her Funtime book.

*

We attribute moods to the sea. It can be ‘peaceful’ or ‘angry’. We project our moods onto the sea while at the same time allowing the sea to change our moods. I walk along the shingly shore of Sandy Hirst with the sea slipping in and filling the estuary, the water quietly, mesmerizingly inching up the shore. If I was not calm before, I am now. I tread along the wide bay with a big sea crashing in to the boom of a bass drum. If I was dull before, my spirits are now recharged.

Surf

This interaction between the natural world and the observer is fascinating. William Wordsworth in his poem, ‘Tintern Abbey’, inspired by the scenery of the Wye Valley and, significantly, remembering his boyhood days in the Lakes, has these revealing words. He is a lover of nature, he tells us, and

‘ …… of all the mighty world
Of eye and ear, both what they half-create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.’

There is, it seems, a creative input into what he observes — he half-creates as well as perceives it. It is not that he makes it all up in his head — it is not a solipsistic vision; more that he suggests a sort of symbiosis between the ‘life’ of nature and the workings of his own imagination. The feeling was particularly strong in Wordsworth, calling nature his ‘nurse’ and ‘guide’, even to the extent of shaping his morality. Being orphaned at an early age perhaps had something to do with it.

This symbiotic relationship between the world out there and the seeing eye is strikingly expressed in a fine book by the nature writer, Mark Cocker. ‘Claxton’ is the journal of a year of wildlife in his small Norfolk village, and at one point he is remarking on the winter arrival of great flocks of pink-footed geese: ‘Those birds of the far north have the power to transform the atmosphere of the entire landscape……They brought some other rare element to it and aroused a richer sense of what life can be. Perhaps it is the meeting of these two elements — the outer and the inner life — that we should really call ‘the wild’ ‘.

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‘Night swimming deserves a quiet night’ goes the REM song. Not something I would want to do on the chill North Sea coast where I now live. But in the Ionian once, off the beach of a little village in the north-west of Corfu, after a brief but happy friendship, a meal and a carafe of local wine, I was enticed….

….to go night swimming when
the inky Ionian slides into the sky,
to swim in the rich night
that glows liquid aquamarine with
sea-jewels sapphire and gold,
to be glazed by the cool current,
my turns and twists and flicks just
gestures in the dance of the waves,
to surrender to this other
that sleeves me and enslaves me,
embracing and escaping in one kiss,
then to rise up rinsed and weightless,
my skin skinned and the deep night
dipping into a soundless sea….

Night swimming…