Lulled by the Sea’s roll
and curl, its breath synced with mine, I return to my dream of floating far
from land, the boat long gone, just me and the Sea and the sky. A me-shaped
hole in the vastness of the Sea, two turbulences enmeshed with each other in a
nameless place on no known map. The tight breath and anxious splash and
oh-my-God of my earlier corkscrewing desire to stand up and out of the water
and see where I am, to orient myself, are now released. Soft. My thoughts are
fluid, nomadic, provisional: they flutter and drift and unravel in a waking
that is brushed by wet sleep, carried on the currents of association, very
small, very quiet, a slow swarm, the little by little suddenly. I have the
impression the Sea can somehow hear my thoughts.
In the Mandaean sect in
the region of the Iran-Iraq border, newly ordained priests marry a cloud, a
stand-in for a wife in the other world. The Mandaeans’ holy scriptures tell the
story of Dinanukht, half-man, half-book, who sits by the waters between the
worlds and reads himself … (1)
Movement and
transformation. The resilient persistence of matter, its survival, its memory -
and yet the bottom line is that the only constant is mobility, change. It’s all
circuits and flows in the mortality of forms, and the unpredictable migrations
of their constituent parts. There are the remains of sea creatures in deserts
and on mountain tops. Shells on Everest. And a tiny bead of sweat on a forehead
might contain something of the exhaled vapour of another person or creature
from long ago and far away. A glass of water here now is informed by the past.
Perhaps it holds molecules evaporated from a glacier, a tree, tears, mist,
snow, fog, ice, a cough, the gurgle of a new-born child ‘trailing clouds of
glory’ or someone’s final sigh. Maybe even molecules from Archimedes’ bath
water. Countless micro-moments of time, from yesterday or centuries ago on the
other side of this blue ball, potentially co-existing in the same small
container. The glass itself was once sand. It’s almost promiscuous, this
co-mingling, and there’s joy in that thought.
I was born by the river in a little tent
Oh and just like the river I’ve been running ever
since
It’s been a long, a long time coming
Researchers estimate that
12 million tons of Sahara dust drops out of the air onto the Brazilian
rainforests of the Amazon basin every year. Great plume-like vortices of
aeolian sand that rise from the desert and drift west, only the finest
phosphate-rich particles making it across to South America. Shamans too ride on
whirlwinds; the way out of the world, or into another world, is through the
vortex … (3)
If we could only let go of
our compulsion to dress transience in mourning, and instead confer value on
impermanence and change, might we not inherit the earth? Why not lament
(briefly) the very notion of permanence and move on? ‘God’, ‘Truth’, ‘Progress’
- looks to me like these are all cover stories, formative human delusions.
Funny stories to tell ourselves, aren’t they – funny peculiar if not funny
ha-ha. Let their heart-break go. Why not? It would be an act of kindness. Of
realistic optimism. And an occasion for invention. We’ve been pointing in the
wrong direction. Let’s use the fact of transience for our fictions. That’s the
way to turn a death story into a life story. If you want to be remembered, give
yourself away. La la laaaa la laaaa lalalaaaa, oh yes it will.
The words of Meister
Eckhardt: ‘the humble man is he who is watered with grace’ …
Beginnings and endings,
all endings in reality new beginnings. Hourglasses eternally emptying out and
being turned over again and again. At first the Earth was a smouldering sphere
condensed from interstellar gas, its atmosphere a toxic soup of hot vapour. For
maybe half a billion years. Then eventually as the Earth began to cool it
rained for maybe 12,000 years, and the Sea came into being ... As we fade and
die, us humans, the hot-house internal fever of our living bodies begins to
cool from its regular 98.6 degrees Farhenheit, and eventually we become food,
then soil, then … The spilling of seeds …
In the past, when people
died at home, a lighted match was applied to the big toe. The toe would blister
whether the person was dead or still alive; but if they were dead, the blister
would fill with gas and burst.
After he died, Alexander
the Great was shipped back from Babylon in a vat of honey. Nelson came back to
England from Trafalgar in a keg of rum. A temporary suspension, of matter and
time.
There’s an invisible haze
in the air and in the water – the water in that glass, this Sea, that
sky-mountain cloud, in all water – a haze of stuff too small for these eyes to
see: the dust of anything and everything, the ghostly traces of what is carried
in the wind and the rain and the rivers and here, right here in the Sea.
Dancing sediment. Ejecta. Dejecta. Rejecta. A kind of soil, life’s compost.
Trace elements of Newton’s apple. Or of Darwin’s busy worms, their castings the
source of his consolation and inspiration in his final years of life: blind machines
for making soil (aren’t we all?); digestion as restoration, the life
destruction makes possible. (‘Never say higher or lower’, Darwin once wrote in
the margins of a book). We
regularly inhale air-borne fragments of vehicle tires. Possibly dinosaurs. Dodos.
Certainly powdered insects’ wings. Powdered people. Debris dispersed and afloat
and en route to who knows where. How to read and map and re-member these
atomised histories, and our place in their foldings and unfoldings and
becomings. ‘Galloping horses of
the departed century, I will consult ashes, stars, and flights of birds’. (4)
‘Air routinely carries
intimate fragments of rug, dung, carcasses, leaves and leaf hairs, coral, coal,
skin, sweat, soap, silt, pollen, algae, bacteria, spores, soot, ammonia, and
spit, as well as salt crystals from ocean white-caps, dust scraped off distant
mountains, micro bits of cooled magma from volcanoes and charred
micro-fragments from tropical forest fires. These sorts of things can add up.
At dusk the particles meet rising water vapour, stick together, and fall: that
is when they will bury you. Soil bacteria eat what they can, and the rest of it
stays put if there’s no wind. After thirty years, there is a new inch of
topsoil … We live on dead people’s heads […] Time: you can’t chock the wheels.
We sprout, ripen, fall, and roll under the turf again at a stroke: Surely, the
people is grass […]’. (5)
A thousand years ago, in
silent-order Benedictine monasteries, monks communicated through hand signals.
If you wanted honey, you put your finger on your tongue. If you needed a
candle, you blew on your index finger … Where are those breaths now?
It was said of Confucius,
and there was no higher praise: He knows where the wind comes from. It was said
of Lao-Tzu that he spent 81 years in the womb before being born …
Everything is still,
everything moves. Floating here, treading water, pulled down by my body’s
weight, buoyed up by a cushion of liquid. Up-down, gravity and lightness. The
im/possible dance. Everything that is dances this dance. The structure of a
day. Organic life cycles. Weather systems. Social histories. Religions.
Civilisations. Mushroom cloud. Smoke from a cigarette. A glance. A memory,
bursting to the surface like the fin of a fish, then gone. Every breath is in
itself a wave, a weather system, a life cycle of rising up and falling away.
The inhalation can be a falling away, the exhalation an effortless rising up.
Body weather. The wind in my heart – the dust in my head. Internal oceans,
deserts, fronts, cloud formations, floods, droughts, turbulences, seasonal lows
and highs. A synoptic chart of the soul, written in and on the body. Upside
down, inside out.
The wind in the trees, the
oxygenated ocean of air in which we swim or sink; an economy of exchange, inside
and outside touching and blurring, like lovers. The tree-like structures of the
lungs, of blood vessel and nervous systems, of river deltas and tributaries, of
lightning strikes, synaptic connectivities and divisions. The arc of a thought.
Like lovers.
Resemblances, analogies,
metaphors: ‘like’ does not collapse difference and create the same, for the
in-between is unstable, potential, the coexistence of near and far, like and
not-like, identity and difference. The Sea is like the sky, the desert like the
Sea, only … different. Like is a gap. Everything happens in the gap. Mind the
gap, you could fall into it.
It is said that when the
philosopher Empedocles (the originator of the concept of the four elements:
fire, air, water, earth) dived into the spurting liquid magma of Mt. Etna’s
crater, his own ‘Eureka!’ moment at the age of 60 or was it 109, the volcano
promptly spat out one of his bronze shoes …
Falling down. Falling
sick. Sinking. Coming up for air.
Climbing back up. Standing up. Settling down. Falling in love. Free
falling. Rising into love. Defying gravity. Gravity rises, lightness falls.
‘We don’t fall in rows
like hay, but we fall. Once we get here, we spend forever on the globe, most of
it tucked under. While we breathe, we open time like a path in the grass. We
open time as a boat’s stem slits the crest of the present’. (6)
Oh there been times that I thought I couldn’t last
for long
But now I think I’m able to carry on …
Treading water. Leaving no
trace. A little dance written on the wind.
Did you know that camels,
the great anomalously-shaped, grace-ful ‘ships of the desert’, the two-humped
Bactrian model like mobile model mountain ranges, leave oh so delicate lotus
pad-prints in the sand for the wind to wipe away? (7)
Everything is still,
everything moves. Sea. Sand. Sky. Air. Pulse. Breath.
It’s been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will …
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