the zoo at night: beautiful mutants

 

 ‘… like all people who feel uncomfortable in an uncomfortable world, you want to make a map. Well let me tell you it is difficult to make a map in splintered times when whole worlds and histories collide’ (1).

It is a little puzzling to revisit the archival traces that linger from a performance that occurred almost a quarter of a century ago, in search of ‘what happened’: working note books, drafts, photographs, some video fragments, drawings, the programme, reviews, photocopied extracts from associated readings (2), and the odd object, including a blue paint handprint on a square of thick, water-stained canvas, a leather Arlecchino half-mask, and a finger-length luminescent peacock feather. It’s puzzling because the work itself and its processes are of course largely irrecuperable from these things, and the stories my cortex hums to me are of uncertain status at such distance in time, closer to fiction, or perhaps dream. The live event slips in and out of focus, some sequences and details still vivid, brightly lit and ‘hot’ in my memory, others largely defused or eroded over time.

However my memory of the place of the event - the New Fortune Theatre - feels remarkably immediate, embodied, animate; and as I write on this winter’s evening in my home in Somerset, England, in an instant I can cross the world and be there again. It’s a place I still feel I know well. Perhaps its clarity and intensity in my memory in part result from having spent a number of years working from an office in the English Department at UWA that looked out directly on to this space; perhaps in part this is the mnemonic residue of all those hours spent exploring its sculptural geometries and volumes, its live zones, sight lines, the movement of light and shadow over its surfaces. In what follows – a reworking and expansion of some earlier reflections on the production co-written with my core collaborator and friend Barry Laing, with extracts from the performance text – my memories of this place, its architectural and affective particularities, its agencies in the making of a performance, are at the very centre. 

                                                                                                David Williams

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 The trigger source for the Ex-Stasis Theatre Company’s production of Beautiful Mutants, commissioned by the Festival of Perth in 1993, was Deborah Levy’s novel of the same name. Initially the novel was adapted by David Williams and Barry Laing into a performance text/script, which passed through seven written drafts before being submitted to the company. The sequence of 24 episodes in this seventh draft then became the starting point for the material outcomes of the performance itself, which were collectively devised with the full ExTC company (3).

Beautiful Mutants, Levy’s first novel, marks the beginning of her transition as a writer from theatre to fiction, and its textures (linguistic and imagistic), tonal shifts of register and fluid narrative structure mine and extend many of the attributes of her earlier texts for performance. It is a work of vast imaginative range and depth set in the crumbling world of late 1980s capitalism and commercialism, characterized by one of Levy’s protagonists as ‘the age of the migrant and the missile’. (4) With the scope and dexterity of a cinematic vision, Levy hunts in unexpected places and moves easily among the shadows in the lives and fractured minds of people exiled from themselves, displaced geographically and psychologically: their culture too near for comfort, the land of their dreams sometimes too far to realize. In a world of rampant materialism, competition and consumption, the city – Thatcher’s London - becomes a ‘zoo’, peopled and echoing with squeals of desire, dances of obsession and dreams of flight.

ExTC’s production was gathered around and written into the specificities of the performance site, the New Fortune Theatre at UWA: a schematic ‘reconstruction’ of an Elizabethan theatre, with triple balconies on all sides of a large thrust stage, an audience ‘pit’, and a second open space behind the regular stage – and all open to the sky. The architecture of the New Fortune, familiar to both directors, was instrumental in the conception and development of the work from the very outset. We felt that its multiple zones, framings, layerings, its possibility for something akin to the mobility of cinematic close-up, long shot and depth of field, for montage and fluid dissolves of location (5) could inform and focus the emergent dramaturgy of the performance as a whole. Although we would have limited access to the theatre during the devising process, we tried to conceive of the space as protagonist, material and medium, rather than as passive ‘receptacle’ or container for our imaginings. And secretly we played the game of asking ourselves what it wanted, how it could flare into a different visibility by a shifting of the geometry of attention. Ideally the event could both ‘fit’ with the logics and possibilities of the site and at the same time be in a relation of tension or critical friction with it, the performance’s forms and materials somewhat ‘ill-fitting’ in terms of the site’s received conventions and languages (as we perceived them, at least). So the theatre itself as a particular space-time to refer to, align with, push against, hold present. Ultimately, with a view to being playful in a purposeful way, we sought to defamiliarise the space and make its latent dynamics and potentials active and apparent. To this end, the usual orientation of the space was turned through 45 degrees clockwise, with an L-shaped block of seating placed on two sides and two levels, thereby configuring a ‘new’ performance space privileging proximity, encounter and sensory imbrication, as well as a looking anew/askew on a known space at an unfamiliar angle of incidence, its centre line now running from downstage right to upstage left. In addition, the space usually designated as audience ‘pit’ in the Elizabethan configuration was sealed and flooded with water to a level of over a meter in depth. This pool area, the thrust stage and all three levels of the balconies were used by the performers throughout.

In terms of design, the core components were located in the pool: a metal ‘island’ with hinged struts, allowing transformation from a cage in the shape of cupped hands, a claw or a closed bud, into, say, an unfolding sunflower (see episode 3, ‘The Age of the Great Howl’, below); a bridge – a spine, a trestle of bones – with articulated metal supports, which could also be manipulated; a silk and bamboo structure known as ‘the pupa’, a tubular tunnel that snaked around the lip of the thrust and into the water like some massive grey intestinal tract or larval invertebrate; a network of rope and chain rigging, onto which spectators were invited to tie small handwritten notes of desired release, like prayer flags; and the water itself, able to suggest a tropical blue lagoon, a black lake of indeterminate depth, or a sulphurous burning reservoir. The water offered reflective and scriptable surfaces, mirrorings, doublings, and endless possible dis/appearances, dissolvings and re-makings. In its saturated metaphoricity and material fluidity it was conceived as the unstable space of memories and desires, of buoyancies, rips and drownings – in the words of the South African writer Breyten Breytenbach, water as ‘the soul of the mirror’ (6).

In this complex and dynamic space were elaborated the major roles upon which the performance turned. Lapinski, a Russian immigrant conceived on the marble slab of a war memorial, who leaves her home for a foreign land: an ‘island’, another place, an elsewhere. She smokes, conjures the martyrs and ‘love demons’ who haunt her, befriends a Poet, loves a Painter called Freddie, and tells stories. She is a kind of narrator, her voice pervading and animating the space of all the others, their stories enacting her story in turn:

Life is a perpetual to and fro, a dis/continuous releasing and absorbing of the self. Let her weave her story within their stories, her life amidst their lives. And while she weaves, let her whip, spur and set them on fire. Thus making them sing again. Very softly a-new a-gain (7).

In the flat above Lapinski, whose ‘otherness’ particularly confounds him, lives the Revenger. He exists crawling between earth and sky, swimming sometimes, mostly treading water, but burning with the struggle to turn his drownings into dreams. He is frightened and he doesn’t know why, he wakes in the mornings afraid and there’s no one there to tell; but incredulously and comically he is determined to be ‘master of his own fuck-ups’, and most of all amused by his own bitter jokes.

The Poet works on a hamburger production line in a factory on the edge of an urban wasteland – the ‘Meatbelt’, the brown underbelly of the city – with Lapinski and other women, sleepwalkers, blood under their finger nails. Among them is Seashells, a woman who can hear the sea, has visions, and loses her hands to the beast of the machine. In the Poet’s eyes, whole continents flicker as she transports herself, her workmates and the audience across thousands of imagined miles, through borders of every kind, no passports required. She has learnt the art of metamorphosis:

The night shift is nearly over. Soon we will return to each other after our long separation. We will be startled by the distance we have travelled, even though we are standing shoulder to shoulder in the same room. (8)

Freddie is an artist who glories in his own delusional ruminations on Lenin, Freud and Dali. He is a ‘lover’ fragmented by impossible past loves, including Lapinski, who realizes himself in the very moment of his immolation in the voracious lust and flaming mouth of Gemma the Banker. The Banker finds liberation in hatred and destruction. She is ‘love’s arsonist’, a Kali-like corporate raider who loots the city and every possible sexual scenario; ultimately she torches the Zoo in a maniacal, necrophiliac apocalypse of passion and pain.

   

Krupskaya, Lapinski’s shape-shifting cat, prowls through these stories and spaces, transformed by them variously into a grandmother, a corpse, a blow-up doll, and other shadows and reflections between worlds.

The form of the work emerged from these darkly comic and sometimes violent stories of exile and dislocation, and the possibilities afforded by the performance space. Dramaturgically and scenographically, the intention was to engender a cinematic fluidity that enabled radical jumps in space-time, sudden migrations, interweavings and collisions of discrete image-worlds: a kind of dissident, critical surrealism. The performance posited a cartography of multiple or possible selves using an episodic structure to speak of the pathologies of cultural ‘death’ and the possibilities of imaginal ‘life’, and the transitional spaces between. Conceptually, these transitional spaces were orchestrated as rips, tearings, overflowings, bleedings, ecstasies – formally suture, montage, jump-cuts – in an attempt to articulate an increase in the buoyancy of the imaginal pool we are always already swimming in.

In this context, we conceived of images as polyphonous ‘worlds’: collocatory syntaxes conjoining words, physical actions, music, sound and the rhythmed articulation of space – images as dynamic sites of possibility. The ‘images’ were thought of as the visible/audible/palpable intersections of these sites. In this way we understood the pool as a tabula rasa re-definable under different lighting conditions, revealing its depth or solidifying into an impenetrable, black void. The performers swam beneath its surface, emerging from darkness into the dreams or nightmares of their own stories, disappearing, then re-emerging in the memories of others.

The water, and the metal, wood, earth and canvas of the set and its structures – such as the bridge linking the front of the auditorium to the thrust stage – were ‘playable’. They served as musical instruments and pliable forms. The water deflected, reflected and re-animated sound, light and the performers’ actions. In ‘The Age of the Great Howl’, the bridge, which served as one of the sites for the Meatbelt, was played with iron bars for percussive and melodic effect, alongside pre-recorded sound and the thrashing of water. In episode 21, ‘Zoo Apocalypse’, the water was set aflame – fire over water – as were metal, wood and cloth dispersed throughout the space. The pungent odour of fuel and black smoke mingled with human cries and animal murmurings as the flickering shadows kept time with destruction:

The zoo at night is the saddest place. Behind the bars, at rest from vivisecting eyes, the animals cry out, species separated from one another, knowing instinctively the map of belonging. They would choose predator and prey against this outlandish safety. Their ears, more powerful than those of their keepers, pick up sounds of cars and last-hour take-aways. They hear all the human noises of distress. What they don’t hear is the hum of the undergrowth or the crack of fire. The noises of kill. The river-roar booming against brief screams. They prick their ears till their ears are sharp points, but the noises they seek are too far away. I wish I could hear your voice again. (9)

The spoken words of the script were one of a number of ‘textual’ components embedded in these composite images. For example in episode 17, ‘And All for Babies with Bone Disease’, the Revenger tells stories that collapse time and space while the figure of his father, enacted by the performer who plays the morphing Krupskaya, presides over his demise from a second balcony. Drifting piano music, the hollow sound of drips and a distant helicopter threaten the primacy of the spoken/written words.

In addition, we located a series of speakers in and around the performance areas to allow the soundscapes to ‘travel’ through and around, spatialising the movement of sound within the architecture of the theatre. One of the central audio images which recurred in different guises throughout the performance was of a helicopter with searchlight, circling ever closer, before hovering in the night sky above the space, finally careering out of control and being ‘sucked’ into the water with the performers (see below, episode 24, ‘This Does Not Exist’). The performers enact roles of ‘see-ers’, and the ‘seen’; they are able to transport themselves, but they are policed, living under the watchful eye and scorching light of equally possible repressions.

Finally, the particularity of the theatre space itself introduced a wholly productive unpredictability in two ways. Firstly, the weather became an active component of unfolding image worlds, particularly wind – warm gusts and eddies animating flame, smoke, cloth, hair, sounds - and the occasional summer shower, droplets disturbing the surface of the water as if it were reaching boiling point. Secondly, in all of the performances the theatre’s resident peacocks chose to remain present throughout, exquisitely languorous and bejeweled onlookers, uncharacteristically silent, taking up various positions on the balconies like baroque azure extras quietly performing an-other audience. This porosity in the parameters of space and event, their openness to the uncontrollable dynamics of the context (the allowing in of both a meteorological and animal ‘outside’), seemed to amplify and thicken the resonance of images, giving them further immediacy, body and carry.

David Williams and Barry Laing thank Deborah Levy for her encouragement during the production process. All photographs are by Marcelo Palacios.

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EPISODE 1: EXILE IS A STATE OF MIND

The first image of the performance. Soundscape: piano music, a lament, emerging from a sound of sampled water droplets, as the performers who play Lapinski and Krupskaya walk slowly into the space from opposite sides and meet on the bridge. Krupskaya carries an old, battered and threadbare umbrella, inverted above her, like a bowl; a black cloth over her shoulders, like a shawl. She gives the umbrella to Lapinski, who slowly spins it above her head to create her own ‘snow-storm’; from the umbrella white feathers swirl and settle on her shoulders, the bridge and the water below. At the same time, Krupskaya wraps her head in the black cloth, for a few moments becoming the ‘grandmother’, bidding Lapinski farewell.

Both figures then step quietly out of this space, down from the bridge and into the water, as the journey to a foreign land begins. Lapinski moves through the water with the umbrella, looking straight ahead. While she wades, she trails Krupskaya in her wake. She is a ‘corpse’, floating concealed underneath what is now a black shroud: her dead ‘mother’ – a memory, a weight. As Lapinski approaches the metal cage, Krupskaya is released, floating abandoned for a few moments, then re-emerging to dance serenely in the water with the cloth. The umbrella floats nearby, like a monstrous damaged lotus.

A distant dog bark in the soundtrack greets Lapinski as she climbs into her ‘new world’ – an island, a cage. As the music slips underneath, she slowly looks around her at the audience, and begins to tell Lapinski’s story:

           

LAPINSKI: My mother was the ice-skating champion of Moscow. She danced, glided, whirled on blades of steel, pregnant with me, warm in her womb even though I was on ice. She said I was conceived on the marble slab of a war memorial, both she and my father in their Sunday best: I came into being on a pile of corpses in the bitter snows of mid-winter.

On my fifth birthday, my father stole a goose. He stuffed it into the pocket of his overcoat and whizzed off on his motorbike, trying to stop it from flying away with his knees. We ate it that evening. As I put my first forkful into my mouth, he tickled me under the chin and said, “This does not exist. Understand?” I did not understand at the time. Especially as my mother stuffed a pillow full of the feathers for me, and soaked the few left in red vegetable dye to sew onto the skirt of her skating costume.

At the age of twelve, when my parents died, I was sent to the West by my grandmother. She said it was for the best. I was to stay with a distant uncle. When I asked my grandmother why he had left, she said, “Because he is faithless”.

The ‘mother’ has disappeared into the water, and now reappears in deep focus, walking quietly along a side balcony and off into the distance, a blue light painting the plastic shroud that rustles around her: the memory recedes.

Which is how I came to be here. Where women were rumoured to swim in fountains of sparkling wine dressed in leopardskin bikinis. I unpacked my few clothes, books, photographs, parcels of spiced meat, and wept into the handkerchief my grandmother had pressed into my hand. It was embroidered with one scarlet thread with my name – L. A. P. I. N. S. K. I.

The music has dropped out altogether.

            Exile is a state of mind… 

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 Notes

(1)  The Poet in Deborah Levy, Beautiful Mutants, Jonathan Cape: London, 1989, p. 16. Republished by Penguin in Early Levy, a volume with her novel Swallowing Geography, in 2014.

(2)  This pool of loosely related materials, reflecting our fascinations at the time and informing our approaches to some degree, include an annotated copy of Ted Hughes’s poem/film treatment Gaudete, sections of Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse and of Breyten Breytenbach’s Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, two short stories by Gail Jones – ‘The House of Breathing’ and ‘Modernity’ - and essays about the dance-theatre work of Pina Bausch.

(3)  Beautiful Mutants was first performed at the New Fortune Theatre in Perth on 9 February 1993. The project was conceived and directed by David Williams and Barry Laing. The performers were Mandy McElhinney (Lapinski), Felicity Bott (Krupskaya), Barry Laing (‘Duke’, the Revenger), Andrea McVeigh (The Poet), James Berlyn (Freddie, the Painter), Anne Browning (Gemma, the Banker), and Kate Beahan (Seashells). The devising process also implicated the designer Ricardo Peach, lighting designer Margaret Burton, sound artists John Patterson and Andrew Beck, costume designer Bruno Santarelli, and the production manager Mark Homer.

(4)  The Poet in Deborah Levy, Beautiful Mutants, Jonathan Cape: London, 1989, p. 11.

(5)  Although these are characteristics of Shakespearean dramaturgy, film was our central metaphorical and aesthetic stimulus here for an approach to image making in the theatre.

(6)  Breyten Breytenbach, All One Horse: Fictions and Images, Faber & Faber: London, 1989, p. 14.

(7)  Trinh T. Minh-ha, ‘Grandma’s Story’, in Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, Indiana University Press: Bloomington 1989, p. 128.

(8)  Episode 14, ‘One Body’, ExTC adaptation of Deborah Levy’s Beautiful Mutants.

(9)  Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body, Jonathan Cape: London, 1992, p. 135.

Extract from 'Space as protagonist, material, medium: Beautiful Mutants', by  David Williams and Barry Laing, a longer text with extracts from the performance text, published in The New Fortune Theatre: That Vast Open Stage, Perth, Australia: UWA Press, 2018. Eds. Ciara Rawnsley & Robert White

the sea: wave 1

 

The following sequence of texts - 'The Sea: 6 Waves' - were co-written a few years ago with my friends the artists and performance makers Cupola Bobber (Tyler Myers and Stephen Fiehn) as part of a 'Reading Companion' for their performance Way Out West, The Sea Whispered Me, which toured internationally in 2009-10. Published in April 2009, the Reading Companion is an exquisite 24" x 36" double-sided colour poster in which the texts are laid out to take on the shapes of the landscape - Sea, Mountain, Cloud, etc.

Other contributors of additional texts in the Reading Companion were Ian Abbott, Alice Booth, Simon Bowes, Lucy Cash, Karen Christopher, Ezra Clayton Daniels, Zach Dodson, Jeff Harms, CJ Mitchell, and Bryan Saner. The poster was designed by Zach Dodson and illustrated by Ezra Claytan Daniels.

The collaborative writing process was simply structured and wholly pleasurable. Over a period of some months, Tyler and Stephen would send me a textual 'wave', and I'd respond, bouncing another one back across the Atlantic to their base in Chicago. A slow writing into and out of what lapped or crashed on to each other's virtual shorelines.

My heartfelt thanks to Tyler and Stephen for letting me post these texts here, and for inviting me to collaborate in the first place, in this play-fully dialogic way.

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We resolve to believe these people who eat their lunch in silence in their sea-facing cars arenʼt waiting for it to do anything in particular. They are not keeping watch over an unruly neighbor, they arenʼt expecting any event at all. They are just sitting at the edge and looking out precisely because nothing much will happen beyond the slow mechanical play of cloud, sky, and water. Speaking of fishermen who catch no fish, Sebald says, “I do not believe these men sit here all day and all night waiting so as not to miss the time when the whiting pass.” (1)

It should first be noted that I am speaking out of place and that I am not The Sea. I am an imposter with a blue suit on, standing in the middle of the Atlantic, yelling: “I am the sea too” at the passing ships. I have been here - listening - for quite a long time. I imagine that I will be here until my senses cease to work, The Sea has so much to say. Sometimes the gossip from town(s), about the crabs that tickle the belly, about so many clouds (they can be ornery), and ...

I will have you believe that The Sea has just whispered to me: “I have yet to find a home.” I will have you believe that The Sea has just whispered exactly that, and also that I have in return asked the following: “What do you mean? You are The Sea.” The Sea looked down and examined its shoe. It rubbed its forehead. Then it said:

“Iʼm not so sure I can answer that simply, but I will try. I am contained, controlled by gravity and other forces, I go where they direct me. But, I am constantly working to find my way beyond my borders. Sometimes I think I have finally broken through, but I always find there is a new shore waiting for me. There are some people who have built their houses close to me, and sometimes during the night after they have left I sneak into their homes, wet the pages of their libraries, wash over their cutlery, take the fruit out of the bowls sitting on their kitchen counters, wash the floor boards and retreat back to my side of the border that marks me. “

With a wistful note in this last, The Sea trailed off. I took my sky blue kerchief out of my jacket pocket (matches my carnation), and made it ready should it be needed (my manners are superb.) I asked: Why? The Sea started with a faraway look:

“Way out West, way out West, there …”, but then stopped. I readied the kerchief, but after a dramatic pause and a few false starts, The Sea continued:

“If there is a shoreline I will set myself to it, that is my lot. Several billion years of work, digging in the sand, moving it, putting it somewhere else. Knowing this, the men along the shoreline have built walls to protect their towns from me. They are also constantly working, building me new buildings of the same towns a little further west, something to look forward to. They dig and they build walls and I slowly grind them down to dust (wet dust), and then they rebuild their churches and stores and streets and towers, and I work away at it; and so on and so on. This is just what I do and I cannot speak for them. I am always on the move, I have yet to be at rest and feel as if rest will never come. Sometimes it may look like I am calm, or at rest, but I am still working. One would think that I would grow tired, or that my age would keep me from working, but I do not think in terms of tired or age or anything really, because I donʼt have the ability to know if I canʼt go on. Itʼs only that Iʼll go on. Itʼs alright with me.”

Noting a break in the monologue, I saw a chance to tell The Sea about the delightful little town of my childhood … there was the small “playground” that was a patch of sometimes muddy earth next to Mr. Cooperʼs store, and hide and seek with the two neighbor kids and their imaginary friends, and there was my father’s study and the set of encyclopedias, the 4th of July parades with the Indians with the muskets, the abandoned house in the woods where we dug out a fort, the bananas with honey and milk weʼd eat on the picnic morning in the new sunlight, the door jam with my height and corresponding year, the red toothbrush I got at the dentist office (the dentist office smelled like no other place Iʼve ever been.) Just then I noticed The Sea had stopped listening, so I carried on in my head but let The Sea have silence. I was lost trying to remember the layout of every house and apartment I had ever lived in when the sea broke in.

“I have found a set of steps on the coast just north of Blackpool, I believe they call this area Cleveleys. I spend a great part of my days trying to climb these steps. That is, to really climb them the way they were intended to be climbed (one step at a time.) It always goes like this: I step up three stairs, and just as I reach for the fourth, I am pulled back to my body. I guess that I cannot go anywhere unless it (all of it) also goes with me. Sometimes I imagine that I am walking up the steps and onto the land, and through the town past the church, through the pastures on the other side, over the privets, and up the mountain to get a look at what everyone is looking at when they are looking at me. Because I have no sense of it. Imagine, all eyes on you, and never knowing why. But, if I am on the mountain, what am I looking at?”

What indeed, I thought. I thought, can I short circuit my brain by looking at my hand? I watched The Sea. Concentrated on its face. Concentrated on the creases around its eyes, and they seemed to brace themselves for something; looking, but not outward. That look an old Wyoming sheep herder might give when asked if there is anything they regret about a life lived in a trailer in the mountains watching sheep. And their answer is the coffee. The Sea concluded:

“We all walk in mysteries. We are surrounded by an atmosphere about which we still know nothing at all. We do not know what stirs in it and how it is connected with our intelligence. This much is certain, under particular conditions the antennae of our souls are able to reach out beyond their physical limitations (2). These are the shores of dreaming.”

---

(1) WG Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, London: Harvill Press, 1998, p. 52.

(2) Goethe, letter of 23 July 1820, quoted in ‘The Writing of Stones’, Cabinet no. 29 (‘Sloth’), Spring 2008, p. 39.

the sea: wave 2

After a while, I started to describe my own dreams, and how this personal night-time theatre was regularly awash with a Sea bearing the flotsam and jetsam of stories and people and creatures of all kinds. The Sea’s words had stirred some sort of ‘antennae’ within me, and I wanted to share something of my own walks in mysteries, on unfamiliar shores.

“You are often there in my dreams”, I confessed, smiling a little shyly at this sudden intimacy. “So much so that sometimes I wake up drenched, my skin salty, the skin on my fingertips puckered and ridged like … prunes … or those little sand ridges that look like waves in the desert. Often when I sleep I swim, supported on your surface like a bird on a sea of air; sometimes I even walk through the forests and valleys and dunes beneath you”.

The Sea watched me for a moment, then closed its eyes slowly as I continued.

“Once while floating on my back – on your back - looking at the night sky, a zebra standing in a dinghy floated past. He was singing softly and rather beautifully from the Book of Common Prayer, from the section on ‘prayers to be used at sea’: “They that go down to the sea in ships: And occupy their business in great waters; These men see the works of the Lord: and his wonders in the deep …” When he saw me, the zebra stopped singing, and politely asked: “I’m a little lost. Do you know how to get to the Sea of Serenity?” “Um, I think it’s up there”, I replied, pointing to the moon. “Oh”, he said. We both looked up at the moon, a bright saucer of creamy blue. 

“Look, there it is”, I continued, “can you see? Between the Sea of Tranquility and the Sea of Cold. There are dozens of seas up there, as well as lakes and bays and marshes. Did you know? Beautiful names, my mother taught me. The Sea of Crises. The Sea of Fertility. The Sea of Ingenuity. The Sea of Nectar. The Serpent Sea. The Sea of Moisture. There are Seas of Islands, of Vapors, and of Showers. The Sea of the Edge is one of my favorites… And then there’s The Bay of Dew. The Marsh of Sleep …” “Oh”, he said, “oh”. Then silence as we both gazed upwards, our faces catching the light. 

After a while the zebra drifted off again, his quiet song slowly picking up again before trailing away on the breeze, little waves tapping out a rhythm on the dinghy’s hull: “For at his word the stormy wind ariseth: Which lifteth up the waves thereof. They are carried up to the heaven, and down again to the deep: Their soul melteth away because of the trouble. They reel to and fro …” I watched his stripy silhouette dissolve into darkness, then the glow of his boat’s luminescent trail - a silvery line like a snail’s track, or a con trail in the sky, until it disappeared too”.

The Sea was barely moving, comfortable now. Another pause, then I started again, my voice little more than a murmur: “Once, when swimming far from shore, dazzled by all kinds of radiant fish that seem to acknowledge me as some sort of fellow fish, suddenly I realise that something is missing. A rope trails from my ankle. I reach down and pull it in, hand over hand. I can see through the water that there is nothing there. Just a rope with a frayed knot at its end. Now I know: I have no conception of where my boat is. It has gone, and I am alone. The sky seems vast, and so does the Sea. I spin and try to stand up in the water, to see further around me, but it’s futile. So I tread water, just my head poking through the surface. The rest of me forms a tiny hole in the immensity of the Sea, a hole in the shape of me in a place with no name, a place on no known map …

“In another dream, I wade through warm surf on to a white beach and find a wooden sign on a stake driven into the sand at the water’s edge. It bears the words: “BENVENUTO ALL’ISOLA DEI NOSTRI SOGNI PROSCRITTI. M. Polo”. Welcome to the Island of Our Forbidden Dreams. There is no sign of Marco on the beach. Just a huge bird, still as a statue, a gull of some kind, staring at me with eyes like wells. Around the bird, little eddies of sand – tiny eruptions like nervous whirlpools – fizz up for a moment then disappear”.

The Sea may well have been sleeping by now, it was hard to tell. It certainly looked peaceful, and the soft rise and fall of its waters suggested a deep-breathing ripple passing through its body. So I kept talking, thinking that somehow my words were a kind of lullaby, and that if I stopped the Sea would wake up startled at the absence of the sound of my voice – like a baby or a grandparent when the conversation suddenly ends or the TV is finally turned off. Or a bit like my friends who have lived by the sea for years; whenever they travel inland, they find it hard to sleep at night without the sea’s sounds – they say that the absence of its continuous russssshhh unsettles them.

“Once I even met a blind dolphin; she floated through the air several feet above the water’s surface, under a silk umbrella. Although she was blind, she moved straight towards me and hovered above me. She softly pressed her nipple into my mouth, and I drank her milk. Don’t ask me what it means.

“In one of the dreams I remember most clearly, and it’s a recurrent one, the Sea has vanished suddenly - and completely - and its exposed bed is dotted with people out walking, inspecting what it has left behind. (Perhaps in the dream you’ve gone to the mountain to look at what everyone is looking at? Maybe. If you have, I guess what you see from up there is just a sea of people where you once were …) Anyway, so the Sea’s vanished, and there are all sorts of people out there, bent over inspecting a patch of ground, or a piece of driftwood the size of a small tree. Or a bloated purple jelly-fish, scratching at the sand around it with their feet. I can see laughing kids with buckets and spades making castles and cities, and dads sculpting mermaids with shells in their hair, and writing messages in huge letters for the sky. Huddled figures have gathered beside a pool and they stare into it in silence, as though it is infinitely deep, or the plug hole through which the Sea has departed. 

As far as the eye can see, thousands of shiny fish pulse on the sand, clasping and unclasping like fingerless silver hands. Perched on some rocks is a wreck of a wooden schooner encrusted with barnacles, its cabin draped in fine weed, like Christmas decorations; its tattered sails slap and dance in the breeze. Closer to the shore a blue yacht lies on its side, its mast pointing to the sky at an angle of, say, ten o’clock; it looks like a weird oversized sun-dial. Elsewhere there is a beached whale and its cub, breathing heavily, with a man posing for a photo next to the mother’s soft eye: as the shutter closes, the whale blinks. The air is full of birds … 

I stand transfixed on the shore watching all of this activity, too frightened to walk out on to the sea bed and join the other people. For I’m terrified of the possibility of the Sea’s sudden return. Your return … Perhaps that low smudgy strip of grey cloud on the horizon is in fact a thundering wall of water hundreds of feet high … Nobody seems to notice except me, they just carry on regardless. I stand there, trembling like a hobbled racehorse”.

By now the Sea was fast asleep, as still as oil. Not a whiff of breeze to ruffle its surface, which glistened like an infinite expanse of beaten copper in the last of the sunlight. In the silence I became aware again of this mysterious pulsing life all around me. A primordial flux. With the moon now rising, I remembered that in Greek cosmology everything begins when Eros issues from the egg of Night, which floats upon Chaos. Something like that. I half expected the zebra to drift into view. 

Having got going, I continued ...

the sea: wave 5

Elsew/here I could hear particles that are in that air … that they have something to say to the particles that are below me, in the water. That those that have entered the sieve of The Sea, and through its motion (longing for the land) have been ground so light as to wash up somewhere to be taken up by the wind, that spoon the sky uses to stir, lift, and mix. The greater the scale of your vision (in your head), the less the descriptor entropy becomes appropriate. There are so many things happening. And we arenʼt in control. And that is beautiful. That means the small moments of our lives exist in a system, and what joy they bring is perfect and especially enigmatic. This is a permission to look at the world, open to feeling, like yourself a net, things to remember, or interest, or excitement; the beauty is in the collection of things that you become. A collage. A good diary never makes that much sense to the little brother. Like a walk, ice cream, a performance, a book, or a painting ... the things they stand for, remembered.

Elsew/here: The sun goes down. The sky and sea become indistinguishable.

As if there were waves of darkness in the air, darkness moved on, covering houses, hills, trees, as waves wash round the sides of some sunken ship … The light had faded from the tool house wall and the adderʼs skin hung from the nail empty. All colors in the room had overflown their banks. The precise brush stroke was swollen and lopsided; cupboards and chairs melted their brown masses into one huge obscurity. (2)

Elsew/here, like a grain of salt becomes known by every molecule of water in a boiling pot and has the effect of raising the boiling temperature of that water, so is the effect of our buildings on The Sea. And just as the boiling potʼs water becomes vapor slowly, sending it and its humid saltiness into the air introducing itself to the air in the same way the salt met the water. All at once, a chemical wicking at light speed. As much as the waterʼs mood affects the land, so it affects the air, and in this way great changes happen slowly. Like the Seaʼs assault on our shores, The Sea is content with slowness. It takes the parish churches of our towns, as it always has, and introduces them to the air, the clouds, and those grains that were walls that protected our worship, or our thoughts, come back to us and try to find their way into the folds of our clothes, moving with an assist from the breath of wind to find the spaces at the threshold of our houses, to re-occupy. Stone is our most permanent building material, but its life isnʼt the width of a human hair on a 300 foot timeline of this world. It may be that you are breathing the parish church of St. James right now, a lone microscopic particle that remembers finding a hair in your nostril, now a part of you. And its time with you will be relative to the start of a blink of an eye. But that doesnʼt mean it doesnʼt happen. The gravity of a moment isnʼt judged in terms of its duration.

Elsew/here entropy is a microscopic phenomenon. Such a thing does not exist when viewing the earth from space, or the universe from the stars, or space from the edge of space. Matter has no death.

Elsew/here particles cluster into voices: (in order of encounter) Stan Laurel, Paul Valéry, Stan Laurel, Herman Melville.

Well I couldn't help it, I was dreaming I was awake. And then I woke up and found myself asleep. (Laurel) I was walking on the very edge of the sea. I was following an endless shore … This is not a dream I am telling you. I was going I know not whither overflowing with life, half intoxicated with my youth. The air deliciously rude and pure, pressing against my face and limbs, confronted me – an impalpable hero that I must vanquish in order to advance. And this resistance, ever overcome, made of me too at every step an imaginary hero, victorious over the wind, and rich in energies that were ever reborn, ever equal to the power of the invisible adversary …

That is just what youth is. I trod firmly the winding beach, beaten and hardened by the waves. All things around me were simple and pure: the sky, the sand, the water. I watched as they came from the offing, those mighty shapes which seem to be running from the coast of Libya, charioting their glistening summits, their hollow valleys, their relentless energy from Africa all the way to Attica across the immense liquid expanse. At last they come upon their obstacle, the very plinth of Hellas; they shatter themselves against those submarine foundations; they recoil in disorder towards the origin of their motion. When the waves are thus destroyed and confounded, yet seized in turn by those that follow them, it is as though the forms of the deep were engaged in strife. One sees white horsemen leaping beyond themselves, and all those envoys of the inexhaustible sea perishing and reappearing, with a monotonous tumult, on a gentle almost imperceptible slope, which all their vehemence, though it come from the most remote horizon, will yet never be able to surmount … (2)

Do you believe me or believe what I see? (Laurel) … consider them both the sea and the land; and do you not find an analogy for something inside yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life ...

Elsew/here the Sea is massive and its featureless-ness helps us to understand the size of those systems at play on this planet, whereas land betrays us into the lullaby of geographic specificity. Humanity is just as geographic as land, and we are function of these systems, and the motion of these systems is whatʼs awesome, and my impact, your impact, on these systems is nano, but the crater of impact isnʼt the measure of meaning, itʼs only a physical resonance. What is beautiful is inside you, the viewer. And to feel beauty is great, but not material, and not truth, and not eternal. In fact, beauty does not exist where one can smell eternity.

Elsew/here things are remembered, and their pattern comes together like a cloud atlas. A system viewed too closely for connections reveals none. Latent connections are like mist. Heat the air with your breath and they disappear like so much vapor. Intentions turning into words often sound like pain. Keep your love locked down. Internalizing the world happens like a collage, not like the linearity of external living.

Elsew/here erosion reveals fossils. Layers working back on themselves, patterns appear in complex systems when given the chance (time).

Elsew/here … “in the space of a few minutes, the bright sky darkened and a wind came up, blowing the dust across the arid land in sinister spirals. The last flickering remnants of daylight were being extinguished and all contours disappeared in the grayish-brown, smothering gloom that was soon lashed by strong, unrelenting gusts. I crouched behind a rampart of tree stumps that had been bulldozed into long lines after the great hurricane. As darkness closed in from the horizon like a noose being tightened, I tried in vain to make out, through the swirling and ever denser obscurement, landmarks that a short while ago still stood out clearly, but with each passing moment the space around became more constricted. Even in my immediate vicinity I could soon not distinguish any line or shape at all. The mealy dust streamed from left to right, from right to left, to and fro on every side, rising on high and powdering down, nothing but a dancing grainy whirl for what must have been an hour, while further inland, as I later learnt, a heavy thunderstorm had broken. 

When the worst was over, the wavy drifts of sand that had buried the broken timber emerged from the gloom. Gasping for breath, my mouth and throat dry, I crawled out of the hollow that had formed around me like the last survivor of a caravan that had come to grief in the desert. A deathly silence prevailed. There was not a breath, not a birdsong to be heard, not a rustle, nothing. And although it now grew lighter once more, the sun, which was at its zenith, remained hidden behind the banners of pollen-fine dust that hung for a long time in the air. This, I thought, will be what is left after the earth has ground itself down.” (4)

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(1) Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Orlando: Harcourt Inc., 2006, p. 174.

(2) Paul Valéry, Dialogues, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989, pp. 111-12.

(3) Herman Melville, Moby Dick, New York: Norton & Company Inc, p. 236.

(4) WG Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, London: Harvill Press, 1998, p. 229.