Tidings

High tide this morning driven by a wet North-Easterly. I crouched on the pebbly shore and took a couple of snaps. Not exactly a Caribbean-style hurricane, I grant, but stirring enough. What is it that sends people running to the promenade in their anoraks whenever the latest named storm hits the seaside town? An element releasing a power, a ferocity beyond our control maybe. That mix of spectacle and hazard which jolts something within us beyond our usual experience. A glimpse of that ‘other’…

I remember watching the defunct power stations in Wakefield being blown up and the rush of excitement as the explosives were detonated and the rubble crashed in slow motion to the ground. We were kept well within the perimeter fence, of course.

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There is a place I go to sit and watch the sea. A flat table of sandstone reaching out from the shore. The sea laps around it.

From time to time I have tried meditating — the ‘mindfulness’ sort, you know. The idea, I believe, is to clear your mind of distractions and achieve some sort of inner peace. But I find it impossible and not just because my aged legs will not bend themselves into that iconic Buddhist pose. No, there are too many distractions.

There was one Simeon Stylites, a 5th c. ascetic who spent most of his life perched atop a pillar eschewing worldly goods. In the end he had to stand on one leg, ulcerous sores incapacitating the other one, thus receiving accolades for his acts of spiritual bravura. Never fear, I shall not be sitting here long enough to develop the slightest ache in my bottom.

As I say, too many distractions. When I try to keep my eyes on the incoming waves, it occurs to me that the sea is very like my mind — always on the move, the continuous flux and flow, the depths and undercurrents, the surfaces — the motion of the waves, choppy or gentle, and the slow oscillation of the tides like the turnings of the subconscious.

The sea feeds my senses…the sight of it, the whoosh and roar, the salty tang. And, to use Guillevic’s word, the ‘feel’ of it. A kind of emotional pressure, I guess. So I watch the plot that it weaves. My ‘meditation’ is exploratory. It seeks stimulation, not stasis. ‘Behold, the sea itself…its limitless heaving breast..’ sang Whitman.

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The Sea Was Never My Horizon

Back then the sea was never my horizon.
My boyhood plimsolls skidded along chalky tracks
or scuffed through drifts of autumn beech leaves.

Now green waves break and bloom like forests,
the shallow tide fans out like wind-blown grass.
Underwater is my den of ferns.

 My old boots trudge along the shingle
And fine sand runs through my fingertips.

Flotsam as I Am

The thunder of the surf and
the gale in the pines are one
and I can’t hear the trudge
of my boots in the shingle.

My head spins with it all,
flotsam as I am, thrown up
by the wind-whipped tide,
the sky howling at the waves,
the breakers crashing through tree-tops.

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William McTaggart (1835-1910)

Walking round the Scottish National Gallery, I come to my favourite section…in the more modern era, anyway. I am always drawn to the sea paintings of William McTaggart. He came from the west coast and painted the sea avidly. He studied at the Edinburgh Academy and was certainly influenced by Constable and Turner, though the mark of Impressionism is there in his brushstrokes.

Machrihanish Bay 1878…’the rhythmic pounding waves and ever changing skies’

The Storm 1890 If you look closely you can see figures..not fleeing but subsumed in their element.

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Another snap of the sea this morning..