The sea; an ocean.
It literally staggered them. Its immensity, stretching the horizon, far and away, away, away. Its beauty and its beauty and again its boundless, inexplicable beauty. The whole of their being is agape to this wonder.
Slate. Aquamarine. Aegean. Clouded then clear: shimmering the sun, silver scales, rippled by an onshore breeze.
They gasped.
Their first time.
Other times, they sensed, the ocean would surge, waves towering over the shore and breaking with the crash of thunder, the hammer of a god. The mightiest force: a force of forces; gravity and the gale.
Hurt and humbled now, shrieking pain and debasement.
When they felt its awesome power and then its terrible, terrifying emptiness, they did fall to their knees. There were understandings lost with this extinction, behaviours even they could not comprehend, foresights, strategies, alliances… The ghosts of more than a million species flooded in on them from all time before, churning and demanding. They registered these spectres not as numbers but as an overwhelming implosion of senses and affects: the icy light in myriad eyes, seeming to implore and yet… A well of pity, the tang of salt on the air, stinging their eyes, delicious on their tongue. Awestruck, breathless. Scales and spines and tentacles trailing beneath their fingers. A broken scallop shell, jagged edges and dripping blood. Disorientation and destruction.
Sorrow.
Grief.
The taste.
Of it.
First as tragedy
Closing their eyes, they dug their fingers deep into the moist, cool sand of the beach, clawed, gripped, held tight. Held on; barely. Crustaceans, krill, dolphins, molluscs, sea snakes, phytoplankton, whales, coral… At the moment in time which they felt most keenly of all the moments that welled inside them, bursting out of them, sundering them; of all these times that they knew all at once and forever, at that random moment, they did sense quantities, a deluge of vibrant data, writhing before them. Before them: the being of over a quarter of a million animal species; more than eighteen thousand species of fish; some four trillion individual fish. Feeding, breeding, and swapping sex.
Easily
Too easy.
Outrageous.
Gone.
Polluted, poisoned, hunted, hooked, harpooned, gaffed, speared, netted, dredged, then mongered, boiled alive, suffocated, gaping and gasping.
Dead.
Inside.
Them.
But…
But
There are selkies too; mermaids and the song of sirens. Seduction, sea gods and submerged cities. Sunken galleons, shivered timbers and treasure chests; Davy Jones and the fourth drowned, ‘thirst like a dredger, died of blisters’. Alcyone of Thessaly who, grief-stricken, drowned herself in the ocean but who was returned as a kingfisher; the nymph Elektre who married Thaumas the sea god and gave birth to Iris, the goddess of rainbows; Pleione, protector of sailors, daughter of Oceanus, the sea personified, and mother of Merope, who became human. And faded away. Submarines, sea cucumbers and sponges. The mortal terrors of Leviathan, Isonade and kraken. Poseidon and Neptune, Prince Namor and Aquaman. Troy Tempest aboard Stingray. Surf boards and pearl fishers.
Coming up for air.
An octopus is not a toaster.
A feeling of the ocean, an observation about that feeling, a theory about observation, the scent of observed feeling, the molecules of a scent, a perfume bottle, glass, frozen fluid, liquefied grains of sand, an unending stretch of beach, a bleaching porpoise skeleton, stranded jellyfish teased by an oblivious turning tide, sandpipers scuttling the waterline in search of food, worms… A wormhole, unknowable.
Over, under and through the waves: The Nautilus, Titanic, Kon-Tiki, The Mary Celeste, A pedallo.
Driftwood.
Oil spills.
Mermaids’ tears.
Casting away as refugees drown.
Leg irons, rusting.
Slave ships…
Slave ships!
They wretched and spewed.
The moat of a child’s shell-encrusted sandcastle fills with water, at first a trickle, a tiny breach, then a flood. And the castle crumbles, undermined, awash, fallen and reunited. The sea tinkling stones and shells as it seeps away. Returns. Seeps away. A lullaby. Rock pools remain. Teem. A yellow shrimp net on a plastic stick, moulded to mimic a bamboo cane, abandoned. Somewhere, deeper, farther away, there are salmon leaping to spawning grounds and dolphins spinning in the air for the pure joy of it, twisting like a carnival of ribbons, show-offs from a super-pod.
Skimming stones: one, two, three, three, four, five…
Once I caught a fish, alive.
A floating shard of plastic, formerly a bottle for ‘electrolyte enhanced alkaline mineral water’, is colonised first by algae, then barnacles establish themselves, sea skaters arrive and lay their eggs, reproduce and thrive on it.
A hermit crab makes its home in a tin-can that once held mackerel in tomato sauce.
And then as farce.
Flying fish flock, hover between death and death: the jaws of dorado streaking murderous in the water below them, the scimitar bills of frigate birds spearing from the skies above.
The tears of the sea, weep from you and me.
They wipe the spew from their chin, laugh like a bottle-nosed dolphin captured and confined, performing tricks and going stir-crazy, an hysterical chirruping, toothy cackle.
That isn’t any laughing.
This is not laughter.
Upside down.
It makes them smile.