Every year, for longer than I can remember, we’ve gone in the sea on boxing day. The cold chattering of sororal teeth, the quick strip and dash into a rising tide. Galloping over waves too large or too little and never quite just right.
For almost every birthday I’ve submurged my whole body in the sea, and followed it up with sandwiches, and digging deep holes in the sand, and coming home with pockets full of pebbles and jamjars full of ocean water to bring a little bit of ocean magic home with me.
A biannual rebirthing, once in the depths of winter, and one in the height of summer. One as the year shifts itself anew, and one when I do.
Striking out into cold water, arms blue/white ahead of me, sun striking off the waves like white gold in the foam. I don’t know if it’s the lapsed catholic hiding somewhere in the recesses of my brain, but there’s something baptismal about it. Stepping swimming-costume-naked into cold water, and returning rejuvenated to the welcoming shore. Before this Friday, I hadn’t been in the sea for more than 18 months. Not for the boxing day just gone. Not for my birthday. My skin unkissed by the salt slap of ocean.
I think I was always meant to be a wild swimmer. Dipping into rivers, and lakes, and bathing ponds. Odd little sections of water found in cities that feel as though they shouldn’t really be there; long wide stretches of thames fallen into with friends. It’s long been said about me: if there’s a body of water I’ll be in it, regardless of of what I’m wearing, regardless of the weather. I’ll be swimming.
That’s why it’s so weird to have no swum in the sea for so long. The sea is not like a river. I’m not sure why, but it’s not. Not just because of the salt, but perhaps because of its size. In the ocean, you’re in all oceans. Atlantic touching pacific, touching adriatic, touching mediterranean. One sea is all seas. If I am in the ocean, I am in the world in a way that being on land doesn’t quite meet. Land is striated by enclosure and ownership. Borders mark its territories and make parts of it unavailable. Now, whilst I’m aware that the ocean is marked – it’s also not. The water moves in a way that land doesn’t. Particles shifting, currents pushing and pulling themselves everywhere and nowhere. At what point does the Atlantic become the Pacific? When does the water become someone else’s. It can’t. I don’t think so anyway. The ocean offers a kind of submersion into the concept of a whole, an entirety, a collective kind of feeling, that being a biped roaming the surface of terra firma cannot. Out in the walking world we’re individuals. In the sea we become a part of something other.
Roger Deakin’s Waterlog is a book that felt fitting, here. He was a nature writer, who wrote specifically about the experiences of immersing oneself in nature, and so it seems obvious to me that he’d have written about submerging himself into wild waters. The final image of the book is of Deakin himself, striking through the breakers and turning back to look at the land behind him, dipping below the rise of the water, and giving him the impression of being alone in the water, miles from anywhere. Nothing but sun and sea and sky. The diping and rising of the sun and moon in turn a surprising volta to end on. Everything in flux between rising and setting.
So, on Friday, when I went to the sea myself, my submersion in the icy water of the english channel was again a kind of baptism. A moment of emergence, like Venus stepping from the ocean to the shore in Rhodes. Whilst I was out there, though, it didn’t give me a feeling of isolation. I didn’t look back towards the french shore, but rather over to where the white cliffs of home were reflecting the brightness of a winter sun back at me. At a time where isolation, and distance from home, have rendered me somewhat numb, the numbing sensation of that cold water instead bequeathed to me a sense that I already was home. Already connected. I’m no patriot. I don’t ‘love my country’ because it is my country. But I miss my home. I miss my friends. I miss the ease and connectivity of free and unhindered movement. The sea is all about free and unhindered movement. I felt at home touching something, touching home.
In French the channel is called La Manche, the sleeve. Which, to me, seemed fitting. I felt as though I were donning a new coat. In the raw nakedness of ocean swimming, I felt clothed again in a kind of magic that might bear me on to the next time I can go home. Because, in a way, I felt like I had been home. Which is something akin to golddust right now. I am clothed in watery sleeves, that I carry with me now, even back on dry land.
Bergson, in Creative Evolution, a book that concerns itself with the discordance between intellect and instinct, exploring perception and memory, and how the goal of evolution, it seems, is to grow and to change and to seek novelty. Those things aren’t a purely human reaction to the natural environment, all things seek to grow and to change. Even the very rock beneath our feet shifts like an ocean, though at an incredible decelerated pace. Anyway, in this book Bergson paints an image of life itself as an ocean, in which we are all submerged.
From this ocean of life, in which we are immersed, we are continually drawing something, and we feel that our being, or at least the intellect that guides it, has been formed therein by a kind of local concentration. Philosophy can only be an effort to dissolve again into the Whole.
In a way this puts how I felt, sitting in the sea, looking towards home, into a kind of global perspective. All life was born in the ocean. It was itself formed from the primordial soup that crated the recipe of existence. Before there was anything, there was ocean, and stepping into it, and re-emerging onto to the shore is akin to rebirth. If I were religious I would say my sins had been stripped from me, but I don’t know that I believe in sin really. What I felt stripped of was the lurking anxiety and sadness of isolation. I felt reconnected; to myself and to the world. Dissolved into the whole, and reformed anew. I felt it gave me hope for feeling properly connected again sometime soon. If we were all part of the whole, then this period of separation will end, and we’ll all come together again.
When a wave breaks where does it go? The wave we’re riding, of anxiety and covid tinged regret and worry and anticipation, will break, and when it does perhaps the feeling of isolation will break too.
Goose FM 