Ageless Sea

'I can sit on your shores,
absorb your waves, the tide,

watch the plot
that you weave.
You, the air, the horizon.'

Eugène Guillevic

…or, if you want the original:

‘On peut etre assis sur tes bords,
Vivre tes vagues, la maree,
Regarder le complot
Que vous mettez au point,
Toi, l’air et l’horizon..’

…an extract from ‘Carnac’, a book-length poem by Eugene Guillevic (1907-77) named after his birthplace on the coast of Brittany. The rocky shores, the standing stones —menhirs, the sea: these are the subject matter of the poem, which is in reality a lengthy series of brief verses, terse, lapidary, avoiding metaphor. Of his response to nature Guillevic said, ‘It wasn’t visual for me, so much as sensual. The feel of that earth was my real schooling’.

The poem is overwhelmingly an address to the sea — the ‘you’, the mother, the lover, the muse. His dialogue with the sea is, as James Kirkup said, ‘a mixture of toughness and tenderness, lightness and limpidity.’ Also. I think, of challenge and riposte:

‘Go on then! Go!
A truce on our headlands.
Peace to you, great one’
And peace to us.

We don’t speak to each other,
We ignore each other, we go
Each one his own way.

Would you like us to try
Feigning to believe
That it is possible?’

…..such emotions as crystalize our human condition. Apart from the acerbic upbraiding of the sea there is also the hope of reconciliation:

‘Caught between the rocks
In the course of the tide,
You are happy, one might say.

Soft, soft, caressing --
And it is, perhaps, true.’

Eugene Guillevic (1907-77)

And so this blog, ‘Tidal’, is a collection of my pictures and poems about the sea as I wander along its shores watching the plot that it weaves, listening to its rough music, trying to fathom what it means.

Prologue

I never thought the sea was in my blood,
   landlocked till now by hedge and drystone,     
my tracks trained on rocky contour lines.

 But now it’s my front yard.
   Sitting on the wall watching it break and
      spill along the red reefs at my feet

 I try to learn its language, catch its twang –
   the surf’s riff peeling along the wave crest,
      the grackle of pebbles in the undertow,

 and how it keeps on coming like an illusion,
   the dark swell brimming with intent,
      a dream catching its breath and dissolving.

 At night with the window open
   I hear the thump of its deep iambics
      and feel its pulse beat in the sea-caves of my sleep.

But then, as Guillevic says, ‘We have no shore really, neither you nor I’…….