I am oddly moved by the image of Heath Ledger’s friends and family walking into the ocean at sunset after his funeral. This strikes me as an incredibly lovely way to say goodbye. As I ran today I thought about the ocean and the essential role it plays in my life: summers by Cape Cod bay, weeks at a time swimming every day in the Marion ocean, sailing, skinnydipping, taking the children into the water as soon as it warmed up enough on their first summers as babies. I come by this honestly – my parents cite as one of the major reasons for moving home from London their longing to be close to the ocean again.
Of course I’m not alone in feeling like this; more paragraphs than we can count have been written about the sea. One of my favorite essays is Cold Dark Deep and Absolutely Clear, by Mark Doty, part of which is available here. The essay is a meditation on the death of his partner, Wally, and contains some of my favorite sentences ever written. Doty talks about a wounded seal on the beach, and muses on the image of the merman, a being who can transition easily between worlds. The coast becomes a metaphor for the place where this transferability is possible. He also has some lovely observations on writing and ways of imagining and integrating our experience. The essay is not strictly about the ocean but is suffused with images of the coast and of distant water (cold, dark, deep, and absolutely clear).
My way of knowing experience is to formulate a metaphor that describes or encapsulates a moment; it is a way of getting at the truth. And a way of paying attention, of reading the world.
Is it that I am in that porous state of grief, a heated psychic condition in which everything becomes metaphor?
The instrument through which I look at that night … holds me at enough of a distance that I can describe what I see, that I can bear to look and render, and yet it preserves the intimacy of those hours. That quality, their intimacy, is perhaps more firmly unassailable than any feeling I’ve ever known. I’ve never felt so far inside my life, and Wally’s.
The spirit is that in us which participates. It moves alone, like air or fire, and it moves with the body, lifting the body’s earth and water into gesture and connection, into love.
The body is not me. I am my body, but I extend beyond it; just as my attention laps out, as my identity can pour out into the day. I have learned more about this, living beside the water, as if the very fluidity of the landscape gets inside us and encourages our ability to slip our fixed bounds and feel ourselves as extended, multiple, various.
The ocean and the beach always remind me of Jess, too, of our childhood years in Brewster and of the deep bond we share. I don’t know which of us came up with the analogy that a similar current runs through both of our souls, but it’s apt. All those summers, salt-water bleached hair, too much sun on our skin, reveling in our shared passion for books, words, and images. Then our daughters were born, out of their nine month saltwater cocoons, exactly 12 weeks apart. It’s an understatement to say that Jess is my soul sister, and my conviction that our friendship will last our lifetimes is absolute. Erica Jong’s poems about the sea have always, always reminded me of Jess – so it’s for her that I share some favorite passages here.
I am happiest
near the ocean,
where the changing light
reminds me of my death
and the fact that it need not be fatal.
– “I Live in New York”
People who live by the sea
understand eternity.
They copy the curves of the waves,
their hearts beat with the tides,
and the saltiness of their blood
corresponds with the sea.
– “People Who Live”
If we return again and again to the sea both in our dreams and for our love affairs it is because this element alone understands our pasts and futures as she makes them one. – “This Element”
