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Title: The Sea Author: John Zerzan Date: 2012 Language: en Topics: anti-civ, primitivism, poetry, philosophy Source: Retrieved on October 29, 2012 from http://anagnori.wordpress.com/2012/09/08/featured-essay-the-sea-by-john-zerzan/
Last remaining lair of unparalleled wildness. Too big to fail?
The whole world is being objectified, but Melville reminds us of all
that remains. “There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the
sea.”[1] What could be more tangible, more of a contrast with being lost
in the digital world, where we feel we can never properly come to grips
with anything.
Oceans are about time more than space, “as if there were a correlation
between going deep and going back.”[2] The Deep is solemn; linking, in
some way, all that has come before. Last things and first things.
“Heaven,” by comparison, is thin and faintly unserious.
“Over All the Face of Earth Main Ocean Flowed,” announced the poem by
John Milton.[3] Given its 71 percent predominance on this planet, why is
our world called Earth instead of Sea? Much of the land, in fact, could
be defined as littoral areas where land and sea meet.[4] The sea is a
textured place, infinite in its moods, forms, energies—and not so easily
de-textured. But we see what happens when culture is privileged over
place. The sea, where all life began just this side of four billion
years ago, must still sustain us. Not only are its waters the original
source of life, it also shapes the climate, weather, and temperature of
the planet, and therefore the status of terrestrial species.
Kant saw truth as akin to an island surrounded by a stormy sea; water
might “run wildly” and drown reason.[5] Chaos, disorder were always to
be feared and brought under control. In Milton’s paradise, the ocean is
chafing under restraint,[6] suggesting that it can yield truth when
freed. The power of nature is to be respected, not domesticated.
We come to life in water, in the amniotic fluid. Blood—and tears—are
salty like the sea, menstrual cycles like the tides of the maternal sea,
our mother. The sea is mountains rolling, sometimes calm and tempered.
For Swinburne, “the storm sounds only/More notes of more delight….”[7]
So many qualities; even phosphorescent at times, as I have seen on the
Sea of Cortez. The seascape shows a magnificent array of fluctuating
aspects and energies. John Ruskin found therein “to all human minds the
best emblem of unwearied unconquerable power, the wild, various,
fantastic, tameless unity of the sea.”[8]
If the earth is alive, the oceans are its most living parts. The sea
whispers, croons, bellows in its unnumbered moods, always the “ground
note of the planet’s undersong,” as George Sterling put it.[9] The very
pulse of the sea, not only its perpetual motion, has us imagining that
it is drawing breath. Inspirations and exhalations of a living, if
unimaginably vast animal; many have written of the sea as a fellow
creature. Malcolm Lowry recorded this meditation: “Each drop into the
sea is like a life, I thought, each producing a circle in the ocean, or
the medium of life itself, and widening into infinity.”[10]
In the deep there is beauty and music, the sweeping surge of it is a
matchless strength, a tireless spirit of freedom. Writing in his journal
in 1952, Thomas Merton noted that every wave of the sea is free.[11] We
might seek a heart like the sea: ever open and at liberty.
Loren Eiseley decided that “if there is magic on this planet, it is
contained in water.”[12] Why does running water, even a fountain or an
aquarium, soothe or even heal? Far more potent, incomparable, is the
spell of the ocean. “I was born in the breezes, and I had studied the
sea as perhaps few men have studied it, neglecting all else,” Joshua
Slocum revealed in his late 19^(th) century account, Sailing Alone
Around the World.[13] For many, the sea demands a deep loyalty, prompted
by sheer wonder and the promise of peak experiences. A sense of being
fully animal and fully alive. Ocean-hearted? The sea’s staggering
presence, its pure openness, brings on very powerful sensations. Rimbaud
perhaps went furthest in trying to capture it in words:
As the young Joyce evoked the sea: “The clouds were drifting above him
silently and silently the seatangle was drifting below him: and the grey
warm air was still: and a wild new life was singing in his veins…. On
and on and on he strode, far out over the sands, singing wildly to the
sea, crying to greet the advent of the life that had cried to him.”[14]
The sea, our deepest origin, calls to us. Sea-born, we are drawn
seaward. Alain Corbin, discussing the work of Adolphe de Custine,
recounts the latter’s orientation toward that which “instinctively
relates to our origins….” Namely, that the “sight of the open
sea…contributes to the discovery of the deep inner self.”[15] There is
an exalting and revelatory experience possible in such a confrontation
with the elements. We are humbled at the shore, on the waves, our
presence a question. “The completeness and certainty of nature makes
life bearable, less anguished,” as Richard Nelson has written.[16]
When I was a small child at mid-century, our family sometimes drove west
about sixty miles to visit my Dad’s brother Ed on the central Oregon
coast. My brother and I competed to be the first to see the ocean and
cry “I see it!” It was a thrill to catch that first glimpse, every time.
About thirty years later I came back to Oregon from California and
worked in Newport at a shrimp cannery, near places called Boiler Bay and
Devil’s Punchbowl.
I don’t think it’s surprising that one can feel giddy at the massive
sight. The Pacific encompasses fully one-third of the globe, 64 million
square miles. Twice the size of the Atlantic. The absolute,
(anti-)monumental There of it.
Is it not true that we are all somehow called to the sea by its lure,
persuasion, gravity? Until he was forty John Ruskin was drawn to have
“merely stared all day long at the tumbling and creaming strength of the
sea.”[17] A century later, Robert Frost wrote: “The people along the
sand/All turn and look one way./They turn their back on the land./ They
look at the sea all day.”[18] Where every wave is different, and the
heart and soul expand.
Loren Eiseley felt the Gulf of Mexico pulling him southward as he lazed
in the Platte River. And more than that: “I was water….”[19] In 1826
Heinrich Heine had expressed a similar union: “I love the sea as my
soul. Often, it even seems to me that the sea really is my soul.”[20]
Swimming in the ocean involves an “intimate immensity,” to borrow a term
from Gaston Bachelard. It connects with vastness and is inward, yet also
a vigorous and robust experience. There can be challenges and perils, of
course. Robert Louis Stevenson described a Hawai’ian woman who swam for
nine hours “in a high sea,” carrying the body of her husband home.[21]
Albert Camus confided, “I have always felt I lived on the high seas,
threatened, at the heart of a royal happiness.”[22]
According to an article in the American Historical Review (2006), the
maritime dimension has become a subject in its own right. “No longer
outside time, the sea is being given a history, even as the history of
the world is being retold from the perspective of the sea.”[23]
Unfortunately, its arrival on the stage has occurred on the heels and in
the context of another inauguration, heralded by Gottfried Benn: “Now
the series of great insoluble disasters itself is beginning.”[24]
The fate of the once freshening sea is now that of crashing fish
numbers, accelerated loss of marine and coastal habitats on a global
scale, garbage gyres hundreds of miles across, dying coral reefs,
growing dead zones (e.g. hypoxic zones in the northern Gulf of Mexico),
to cite a few disastrous developments long in the making.
Water is “the most mythological of the elements,” wrote Charles
Kerenyi,[25] and the literature of the sea arguably began with Homer in
the early Iron Age, 8^(th) century B.P. He wrote of its lonely
austerity, “the sterile sea,”[26] a perspective that is certainly
already that of civilization, poised against the natural world. The sea
was by now merely a means, a passageway to increased domination, new
conquests; large war fleets were well-established. Aphrodite, goddess of
love, arose from sea foam, but somehow failed to carry the day.
Seafaring is far older than history; it predates
domestication/civilization by hundreds of thousands of years. Humans
were navigating the oceans vastly earlier than we were riding horses,
for instance. Homo erectus, about 800,000 years ago, crossed scores of
miles of ocean to inhabit the island of Flores in the Indonesian
archipelago.[27]
And even today, long voyages on the open sea are made by people with no
use for metals. David Lewis marveled at a Pacific native who found his
way “by means of a slight swell that probably had its origins thousands
of miles away…. He had made a perfect landfall in the half-mile gap
[between two islands], having navigated for between 45 and 48 miles
without a single glimpse of the sky.”[28] Thor Heyerdahl of The Kon-Tiki
Expedition fame made use of the “Incas’ simple and ingenious way of
steering a raft” on his impressive South Pacific odyssey.[29]
Interestingly, while the Incas revered the sea, the Mayas made scant
mention of it—possibly because the Mayas had a written language and the
Incas did not.
Joshua Slocum’s account of his solo sail around the globe notes how the
South Pacific islanders “take what nature has provided for them,” and
“have great reason to love their country and fear the white man’s yoke,
for once harnessed to the plow their life would no longer be a
poem.”[30] And his further South Pacific observation: “As I sailed
further from the center of civilization I heard less and less of what
would and what would not pay.”[31]
Meanwhile, cannon-armed sailing ships had “heralded a fundamental
advance in Europe’s place in the world” in terms of control of oceanic
trade routes.[32] In the late 1400s Portugal and Spain, the first global
naval powers, competed for vast stretches of the Atlantic, Indian, and
Pacific oceans. The world-wide commons of the seas was rather rapidly
disenchanted and instrumentalized as the era of modern history dawned.
Its relative solitude, silence, spiritual wealth and intimacy gave way
to the onslaught of globalization, and then industrial globalization.
The quiet gracefulness of sailing ships, and the seamanship skills of
their crews, were ushered out in the 19^(th) century in favor of
graceless vessels, noisy and forced, like moving factories. How much
globalized industrial existence is possible under simple sail? Voyages
with time enough to know oceans and heavens, taking what wind and wave
have to offer. Adventures, not timetables and technological disasters.
A sentiment opposed to the Machine was the sea as archetype and key
source of the sublime in the Romantic era. The powerful sea paintings of
Winslow Homer and J.M.W. Turner certainly come to mind. But celebrated
or not, the oceans were being targeted for domestication. In Childe
Harold, Byron wrote: “Man marks the earth with ruin—his control/Stops
with the shore.”[33] Later in the century his words no longer rang true.
Joseph Conrad dated the end of the old sea from 1869, when the Suez
Canal was completed.[34] In 1912 an iceberg quickly dispatched the
largest moving object on the planet. Titanic’s demise was a blow to
confidence in the complete mastery of nature, as well as the opening act
of chronic contemporary disasters.
Peter Matthiessen’s novel Far Tortuga[35] is a troubled meditation on
the sea, with its background of a Caribbean region stripped of sea
turtles, fish, timber, etc. by the 1970s. In fact, John Steinbeck
described Japanese fishing dredges at work off the coast of Mexico in
1941, “literally scraping the bottom clean”[36] with a ravening,
wasteful industrial process. The assault on the sea and its inhabitants
is nothing new, but is always being intensified by advancing technology.
An IBM SmartCloud ad of 2012 boasts of “smarter” computing systems that
enable fishermen “to auction their catch while still at sea,”[37] to
speed up the decimation of the oceans.
Long ago we had few things, on the water especially. Now we take our
profusion of possessions with us. Mass society comes along on the voyage
of industrial tourism. “Voyage” comes from via: away. But there is no
more away. It is no coincidence that the survival struggles of
indigenous peoples and aquatic life have reached a generally similar
level of extremity.
“All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full,” But
Ecclesiastes 1:7 is no longer accurate. Rising sea levels, perceptible
since 1930, are an alarming fact. “Other sea-cities have faltered,/ and
striven with the tide,/ other sea-cities have struggled/ and died,”
observed H.D.[38] Trillions of tons of water are now a steady flow of
polar ice cap melting.
Many studies and new books recount what is starkly clear. Rising
temperatures, acidification levels and pollution; the North Sea has
warmed to the point of tropical fish and birds in the fjords of Norway.
The thermohaline circulation (vertical current movement) in the North
Atlantic is weakening markedly.
Damaged, clearly, but not domesticated yet. A couple of lines from two
anonymous poets: indicating the ocean, “Give me fields that no man
plows/ The farm that pays no fee,” and “The ocean’s fields are fair and
free,/ There are no rent days on the sea!”[39] To watch a fine surf for
hours, to recall direct sensory experience—and ponder its severe
diminution. Many have called the sea the finest university of life, free
from the never-satisfied network of speech and the symbolic. Paul Valéry
felt that “the quickening sea/ Gives back my soul…O salty potency!/ I’ll
run to the wave and from it be reborn!”[40]
There is a kind of purification motif that many writers have touched on
vis-à -vis the sea. Rimbaud, for example, referred to the sea “which I
loved as though it should cleanse me of a stain.”[41] Jack Kerouac’s
first novel mentions “the way this Protean ocean extended its cleansing
forces up, down, and in a cyclorama to all directions.”[42] The
once-scrubbed seas, soaking up the crime of civilization. John Steinbeck
saw that “a breakwater is usually a dirty place, as though tampering
with the shoreline is obscene and impractical to the cleansing action of
the sea.”[43] For Heyerdahl, the Pacific “had washed and cleansed both
body and soul,”[44] echoing Euripedes’ words: “The sea washes away and
cleanses every human stain.”[45]
Its own denizens show us so very much. The porpoises, that always prefer
sailboats; the singing humpback whales; dolphins, with their
extraordinary brain size and intelligence. Did not whales and dolphins
return to the oceans, having found land life unsatisfactory? There is
some kind of open telepathic connection among all dolphins in the sea,
according to Wade Doak.[46]
“I will go back to the great sweet mother,/ Mother and love of men, the
sea,” wrote Swinburne.[47] The sea has many voices. “Deep calleth unto
deep,” to quote Psalms 52:7. All of life is connected, and the “oceanic
feeling” aptly expresses a sense of deep bonds, a oneness. Not
accidentally is “oceanic” the term employed to denote a profound
connectedness. Robinson Jeffers told us that “mere use,” meaning the
technological, the fabricated world, “won’t cover up the glory.”[48] The
glory of the sea, the glory of the non-fabricated world. He celebrated
the wholeness of life and the universe, counseling “Love that, not man/
Apart from that.”[49] Also remember, from the “French May” of 1968,
“Sous les pavés, la plage.”
On his Inca-inspired raft, Thor Heyerdahl discovered a deep truth.
“Whether it was 1947 B.C. or A.D. suddenly became of no significance. We
lived, and that we felt with alert intensity. We realized that life had
been full for men before the technical age also—indeed, fuller and
richer in many ways than the life of modern man.”[50]
And we still have the sea, just possibly too big to fail. “Cease not
your moaning you fierce old mother,” wrote Walt Whitman[51], whose
truest poetry so often evoked the sea. Let’s join with Byron: “Roll on,
thou deep and dark blue Ocean—roll!”[52]
[1] Herman Melville, Moby Dick, or The Whale (New York: Random House,
1930), p. 223.
[2] James Hamilton Patterson, The Great Deep: The Sea and Its Thresholds
(New York, Random House, 1992), p. 92.
[3] John Milton, “Over all the Face of Earth Main Ocean Flowed,” in The
Eternal Sea: An Anthology of Sea Poetry, W.M. Williamson, ed. (New York:
Coward McCann, 1946), p. 187.
[4] Paul Rainbird, The Archaeology of Islands (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2007), p. 48.
[5] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), p. 665.
[6] “Under yon boiling ocean, wrapped in chains,” for instance. John
Milton, Paradise Lost, Second Edition, ed. Scott Elledge (New York: W.W.
Norton, 1993), Book II, p. 38.
[7] Algernon Charles Swinburne, “To a Seamew,” in Williamson, op.cit.,
p. 276–277.
[8] John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, vol. 3 (London: George Allen,
1903), p. 494.
[9] George Sterling, “Sonnets on the Sea’s Voice,” in Williamson,
op.cit., p. 510–511.
[10] Malcolm Lowry, The Voyage That Never Ends: fictions, poems,
fragments, letters, Michael Hofmann, ed. (New York: New York Review of
Books, 2007), p. 239.
[11] Thomas Merton, Entering the Silence (San Francisco: Harper, 1996),
pp 474–475.
[12] Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey (New York: Vintage Books, 1959),
p. 15.
[13] Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World (New York: Sheridan
House, 1954), p. 4.
[14] James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 144.
[15] Adolphe de Custine, cited in Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea: The
Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World, translated by Jocelyn
Phelps (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 1994), p. 170.
[16] Richard K. Nelson, The Island Within (San Francisco: North Point
Press, 1989), p. 129.
[17] John Ruskin, Praeterita (Boston: Dana Estes & Co., 1885), p. 68.
[18] Robert Frost, “Neither Out Far Nor in Deep,” Complete Poems of
Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), p. 394.
[19] Eiseley, op.cit., p. 19.
[20] Heinrich Heine, cited in Corbin, op.cit., p. 168.
[21] Robert Louis Stevenson, Island Landfalls: Selections from the South
Seas (Edinburgh: Cannongate, 1987), p. 69.
[22] Albert Camus, “The Sea Close By,” Lyrical and Critical Essays, ed.
Philip Thody, translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1968), p. 181.
[23] Karen Wigen, “Oceans of History,” American Historical Review 111:3
(June 2006), p. 717.
[24] Gottfried Benn, cited in Ulrich Beck, World Global Society (Malden,
MA: Polity Press, 1999), p. 108.
[25] Charles Kerenyi, cited in Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie,
translated by Daniel Russell (New York: Orion Press, 1969), p. 177.
[26] Homer, cited in Jules Michelet, La Mer, translation by Alice Parman
(Paris: Gallimard, 1983), pp 269–270.
[27] Morwood et al., 1999, cited in Rainbird, op.cit., p. 65.
[28] David Lewis, The Voyaging Stars: Secrets of the Pacific Island
Navigators (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), p. 14.
[29] Thor Heyerdahl, The Kon-Tiki Expedition (London: George Allen &
Unwin Ltd., 1950), p. 84.
[30] Slocum, op.cit., p. 158.
[31] Ibid., p. 157.
[32] Jeremy Rifkin, Biosphere Politics (New York: Crown Publishers,
1991), p. 103.
[33] George Gordon, Lord Byron, cited in W.H. Auden, The Enchafèd Flood,
or The Romantic Iconography of the Sea (New York: Random House, 1950),
p. 16.
[34] Joseph Conrad, An Outcast of the Islands (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, Page, 1923), beginning of Chapter 2.
[35] Peter Mattheissen, Far Tortuga (New York: Random House, 1975).
[36] John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez (New York: Penguin
Books, 1995), p. 204.
[37] “Smarter business for a Smarter Planet: The cloud that’s
transforming an industry, one fish at a time.” IBM, 2012.
[38] H.D., “Other Sea-Cities,” H.D.: Collected Poems 1912–1941, ed.
Louis L. Martz (New York: New Directions, 1983), p. 359.
[39] Anon., “We’ll Go to Sea No More” and “The Fisher’s Life,” in
Williamson, op.cit., pp 309, 310.
[40] Paul Valéry, “The Cemetery by the Sea,” in Flores, op.cit., p. 276.
[41] Arthur Rimbaud, “The Alchemy of Words,” in Flores, op.cit., pp
127–128.
[42] Jack Kerouac, The Sea is my Brother (Boston: Da Capo Press, 2011),
p. 206.
[43] Steinbeck, op.cit., p. 17.
[44] Heyerdahl, op.cit., p. 97.
[45] Corbin, op.cit., p. 67.
[46] Wade Doak, Dolphin Dolphin (New York: Sheridan House, 1981).
[47] Algernon Charles Swinburne, “The Return,” in Williamson, op.cit.,
p. 18.
[48] Robinson Jeffers, “Fierce Music,” The Beginning and the End and
Other Poems (New York: Random House, 1963), p. 57.
[49] Robinson Jeffers, “The Answer,” The Selected Poetry of Robinson
Jeffers (New York: Random House, 1938), pp 57, 594.
[50] Heyerdahl, op.cit., p. 132.
[51] Walt Whitman, “Sea-Drift,” Leaves of Grass (New York: Modern
Library, 1921), p. 205.
[52] George Gordon, Lord Byron, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” Canto
Fourth, The Complete Poetical Works of Lord Byron (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1905), p. 179.