The first time I remember seeing the ocean when I was no where near an ocean was when I was at a friend’s house and the conversation took a sudden turn. The three of us had gathered to watch the presidential debates, and our attention was initially focused on the TV. When the content no longer felt like content, my two friends started up a dialogue I had trouble following. They were talking about sailing, and it sounded like a foreign language—between descriptions that involved storms and boats, I heard words like tacker and jib, mainsheet and leebow. I had no idea what they were talking about, until one of them suddenly teared up, “That water! It was silk, so blue. And the whales followed us for an hour, mostly several yards behind, but sometimes they would come up on our side.”
After that I didn’t even hear the rest. I was in the water, deep under it, watching the whales.
This is the sound of humpback whales.
(I did not know that the algae in the ocean creates approximately 20% of the earth’s oxygen supply! It’s like an underwater rain forest.) [see article link, below]
The ocean as metaphor:
“Imagine seven verses in which each letter
Contains oceans of mysteries—” Shabistarī
The ocean as Poseidon via Ezra Pound:
And by the beach-run, Tyro,
Twisted arms of the sea-god,
Lithe sinews of water, gripping her, cross-hold,
And the blue-gray glass of the wave tents them,
Glare azure of water, cold-welter, close cover.
J.M.W. Turner, when he was 67, lashed himself to a mainsail in order to have a better view of the storm. His paintings in general tend to have an ambiguous horizon line — it often blends/bends/blurs from land to sky or sea to sky — as though demarcation would interrupt the curvature of the earth, as though it is obvious that time is infinite and Out There, ever onward, past the horizon, where both history and the future lie.
This is one of his more famous paintings: Snowstorm, from 1842.
Links:
Outside Magazine, by Ian Frazier
(article with the discussion about the algae)