Noticing, looking up with
my eyes still closed as I was, that the sky was above, as it is, and that the
sky was something too. That it was like The Sea but with more uncertainty. The
Sea’s reflection in a dusty mirror, the something on the other side of our
conscious world, a world that only rises a few stories above the ground, a thin
membrane covering this earth. Planes and submarines, fish and birds, our waste
and our carbon dioxide.
There is sand in this Sea, and it used to be a parish
church, or some other thing, and there is dust in the air, and it used to be
the sand that used to be the parish church. And that sand was in this Sea, and
now that sand is in the air, and it’s moving around this earth and finding the
folds of our Sunday best, the gaps in our windows, our momentarily open doors.
It has not given up, it can’t, like machinery. And it has been everywhere …
everywhere and elsewhere, seeking its place, and this journey isn’t entropy,
this journey is the system. We chase out of our bedrooms buildings of the last
millennium with a broom and a dustpan, their slow insistence on coming in.
There are particles of sand, dust, everywhere. Breaking free of the corner
stone with the help of the water, the other stones. Setting off on an adventure
of currents, ground even smaller climbing some far off shore, seizing the wind,
travelling inland. The grains struggle to remake the Sea’s image on land,
drenching landscapes in the dryness of desert dust, homing in on our freshly
built free radicals, the clock of timing the struggle started with the last
coat of paint.
*****
Elsew/here the sand
drawing is now complete. Over the last week, the shaven-headed monks in the
saffron robes have patiently tap-tap-tapped millions of grains of coloured sand
off the tips of crafted copper tubes into complex geometrical patterns. The
sand flowed like liquid paint. White, black, and three distinct shades each of
red, yellow, green and blue: fourteen colours in all. A pure experience of
colour, and an elaborately imagined sacred space. While they worked, the monks
wore linen masks to cover their mouths and noses, so that their breath would
not disturb the sand. They have been building an elaborate spherical cosmic map
from the centre outwards. Circle square square square circle circle, a spiralling
form structurally similar to the petals of a flower.
For the monks it
represents a movement through levels of confusion towards enlightenment: an
unfolding from two dimensions to many. In short, it is a cosmogram, its width
the size of an adult human, with the emblem of a deity at its very centre. In
this case, the deity is a goddess, both protective and given to explosive rage.
It is said she is dark blue, has three eyes, and rides on a mule through a sea
of blood encircled by the fire of wisdom. The sun nestles in her navel, a
sickle moon arcs across her forehead. She is associated with healing through
knowledge, and is consulted through a system of divination by dice.
The finished mandala is
consecrated through prayer, chanting, meditation, and a series of
visualisations. Each particle of pigment is charged to contain the image in its
entirety, each fragment the whole, each grain a macrocosm, like the individual
shards of a shattered hologram. One of the monks scatters a handful of
six-sided ivory die to one side; the meanings of the numbers and symbols in
this particular configuration are discussed at length. Suddenly, one of the
younger monks sneezes massively, theatrically; the others laugh.
Finally, in a
ritual that stages the impermanence of all things, the monks dismantle the
drawing by sweeping the sand into small piles. It’s a very practical dispersal
of the image, almost casual. Four little grey piles are left, like tiny cartoon
volcanos. The monks bless each of the piles, bag them up, and carry them on the
short walk to the meeting point of river and sea. One final monotonal chant
describes a teardrop shed into an ocean of suffering, and suffering’s release.
Then four monks wade into the surf up to their knees and pour the sand into the
water. Slowly, they release dry into wet, all the while visualising each
coloured particle’s infinite possible trajectories, carried by the sea’s
currents and flows to every corner of the world. They stand in silence, the
ends of their robes bobbing on tiny waves like slopping pools of ochre wine in
slow-motion.
On these journeys, there
is time but not a thing by which to tell it, save the passage of the sun, the
phases of the moon, and the patient pulse of the sea’s pull and give. ‘Seesoo,
hrss, rsseis, oos …’ (1)
*****
Elsew/here a fleet of
steam dredgers removes tons of granite and flint shingle from the seabed
beneath the cliffs to provide material for a new sea wall further down the
coast. God-fearing fishermen with furrowed brows look on from their village at
the foot of the cliffs, wondering what repercussions this might have, this
‘tampering with nature’, this modern arrogance to dream of ‘playing god’. No
good will come of it, they say. Look at them: they couldn’t navigate a turd
around a pisspot, they say. Some years later ferocious winter storms whip the
sea into a frenzy, and the slate sky is thick with spindthrift, like a snow
storm. As dusk falls, towering black waves blast away at the unprotected
village. Never seen anything like it, they say, like the end of the world.
Overnight most of the community’s buildings are devastated, gouged and pulped
to dust by the walls of driving water. The whitewashed slate-roofed fishermen’s
cottages, all of them decapitated and ground down. The small grey stone inn,
its fireplace doused forever. The workshop for making lobster pots and mending
nets. The stables and piggery. The chapel. The tiny Post Office shop. The
village hall, for community meetings and wedding receptions and evenings of
songs and shanties. (Remember? ‘I must
down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky / And all I ask is a tall
ship and a star to steer her by / And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and
the white sail’s shaking / And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn
breaking’). All dust now, carried away tirelessly by the sea. Even the
beach is gone.
Every now and then deep in
the churning bay, minute sandy particles and splinters fleetingly reconfigure
to form the skeletal outlines of what they were once part of – a shed, a
kitchen, the furniture of a bedroom – before a fresh undersea gust tears
through these ghostly outlines, shattering them anew, and the grains disperse
and disappear into the ocean’s depths.
On this journey, there is
time but not a thing by which to tell it, save the passage of the sun, the
phases of the moon, and the patient pulse of the sea’s pull and give.
*****
Elsew/here a ghost net
drifts across the ocean’s surface, a floating island unconsciously gathering
its catch. From a distance it looks like a small reef breaching the surface.
Close up, it’s another story. Caught in the net’s mesh are seaweed, drift wood,
plastic bottles, lengths of blue polymer twine, twisted drinks cans, a paint
can half full of toxic sludge, empty crisp packets, an aerosol can, dead fish,
various bird carcasses, a dolphin cub, and a fluttering tern, its feet caught
in the fine nylon filaments: its wings are the only visible sign of life.
This
is how it happens. A length of pelagic drift netting, one of the instruments of
choice for those barely-legal fishing fleets engaged in a kind of maritime
strip-mining, breaks loose and floats free. As it drifts it entraps whatever it
encounters, gradually ballooning until its mass of waste and putrefying flesh
finally sinks beneath its own weight. Over time, this material then breaks down
or falls free to allow the net to rise to the surface once more - and the cycle
begins again.
Elsew/here dozens of
rusting metal barrels dumped out at sea are washed on shore by a terrifying
freak wave. Some of the containers carry the stencilled word RIFIUTI on their
ruptured flanks; others carry a warning symbol that looks like a three-blade
spinning propeller or fan, black on a yellow background. Nearby, a man with his
head swathed in blue cloth and an automatic weapon slung over his shoulder
stares out to sea; he chews his khat leaf and spits on the sand. (2)
Elsew/here an innocuous
brown glass bottle is washed ashore on an island beach. Over the next three
days, eight people from a tiny tribal community will drink from it and die. (3)
On these journeys, there
is time but not a thing by which to tell it, save the passage of the sun, the
phases of the moon, and the patient pulse of the sea’s pull and give.
*****
Elsew/here, another kind
of sea far inland. The travellers arrive in ones and twos, sometimes a small
van arrives in a dust cloud and disgorges an unsteady gaggle of people,
shrouded against the sun. They carry light bags for the journey, just the
barest of essentials. They have long since said goodbye to their families.
Those that stay behind never say their son or daughter or husband ‘left’ or
‘migrated’; they refer to them as ‘the burnt ones’, those that have burnt the
law, the past. At the meeting point in the dunes a man in sunglasses shows them
the pre-fabricated kit from which they will build the boat. As he explains the
process, he traces lines and swirls in the sand with a stick. Lengths of
untreated pine are laid out on the ground; to one side on a white cloth, a
variety of bolts, screws, two screwdrivers, a hammer, some bags of plastic
ballast. The wood looks like the ruptured rib cage of some extinct beast,
bleached by the sun, then buried by the tidal movements of the sand, and only
now disinterred.
Many of them have never seen the sea; with diverse images of
‘boat’ in their minds, they start to assemble this mysterious thing in which
they will entrust their hopes and their lives. Gradually separate pieces are
linked together and the boat’s outline emerges. Their tap-tap-tapping is
sometimes interrupted by the low throb of a military plane scouring the dunes;
they hide under camouflaged tarpaulins, or lie flat on the sand to try to make
themselves invisible, just more fragments of unremarkable desert flotsam. When
the boat is finished, they stand around it with a mixture of astonishment and
trepidation. In silence they wait huddled against the cold night until dawn,
unable to sleep, then at first light they drag the boat through the sand
towards the sea. We go looking for our lives, they say.
On these journeys, there
is time but not a thing by which to tell it, save the passage of the sun, the
phases of the moon, and the patient pulse of the sea’s pull and give. Soo,
siessr, ssrh, oosees … seesoo, hrss, rsseis, oos …
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