Sunday at the Seaside

[tamaranth]

Fifteen minutes ago [NB: rather more than fifteen minutes before posting this] I was floating on my back, fifty feet from shore, trying to tally vapour trails, sky-lines, and losing count again and again. The sky here is very big: by which I mean that there's a lot of water, no tall buildings this side of the estuary, and a pearly glow to the sky that is reflected back up from the calm North Sea to the east. There's plenty of sky for aircraft to write their courses on, lines of jet exhaust like a time-and-motion study of today's weather patterns, today's flight plans. Earlier most of the planes flew east to west, upriver towards London: this afternoon they seem to be routing flights south-east to north-west. Maybe they're circling like flies over Canary Wharf, as they were the other night when we sat by the river and watched them.

And I thought of all that as I lay there just now, ankles hooked around the metal beacon at the end of the breakwater, noticing for the first time the strong, silvery pennants of cobweb flying parallel to the water, like banners. Tide keeping my back straight, pulling me upriver, stroking. Sky full of geometries that would have been unthinkable a century ago, and are surely more profuse than they were in the Seventies.

'I am here,' I thought: and then wished I didn't feel this need to put it all into words, to communicate it, to share it. Time was that I kept myself to myself, hugging experience close, never discussing or describing or desecrating with the conversion, the bowdlerisation, of experience into language.

Because: words fail me. Words fail any sensuous, sensual experience. I can say that the tide against my back was like silk or like a massage or like falling or like fur. It wasn't. It was like itself. It was like lying back in seawater on a summer's afternoon, rocked by the tide, gazing up at the sky.

Comments

[latexiron.livejournal.com]

Who are you and what have you done with our Tanya?

[(Anonymous)]

Wrapped cosily in anchor chains, third yacht east from the Measured Mile. Look for her at low tide. Bwa ha ha.

Re:

[latexiron.livejournal.com]

Anchor chains? I think not!

Finest hemp and silk, prepared with Mink oil, more like.

[drpete.livejournal.com]

Ah. Not in Brighton then - or your experience may have read "clinging grimly to the end of the breakwater with my toes and about to be rescued by the RNLI having been pushed into the pounding surf by the ravening sun-maddened, drug-crazed hordes"

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

Nice writing...

[marypcb.livejournal.com]

experiencing it is one thing; writing it is another experience where you reprise it. not the same - but good too - and you're more likely to stumble across the written again than to suddenly remember the experience without it

handy thing breakwaters!

[tamaranth.livejournal.com]

Writing it from memory would be one thing: trying to formalise an experience into a verbal description while it's happening is quite another. And it's not as though I wanted or needed, specifically, to remember it: if the memory springs up, fine: if not, not ...

It's the automatic response of 'writing it down' that bothers me ...