Wave (Philip Hunter)

Waking we go to the sea to gaze into the recurrent waves. We want to ask the sea any question, in hope of finding the answer inside ourselves. They crash into us, knock us down or drag us along until we learn to duck or plunge or surf the waves. They seethe past us and rush undertow, the water cold from night. The pleasure of their rhythmic repetitions answers a certainty we learn in time. For even provisional answers are answers, as much as we grasp. And even here inland where the earth gives off the must and grit of worn seasons, we hear the recurrent waves. The slight breeze turns to a light breeze turns to a right wind and we hear the waves we never see, where the breezes come from, mighty and frightful out of the sea. Stillness turns to swell. Where squabble and chaos typified nightfall, froth and wash comes with morning. Artists cannot keep up and are reduced to shorthand. Our beings may resolve to gaze hard at the course of tempest.  Yet peace comes with these tranquil after effects of waves, one after another, though the pattern is imperceptible and innocent of the efforts of a formal draughtsman. Shore and moon before did their greatest, while here the lift and rush is settling and almost human in its small games.

Dreaming the sea rises up to take us down. Where we go in the surge is hardly even our business. We find the floor and ceiling equally endless, rigorous and writhing.  They are like eternities we barely have a moment to consider, should we care, should we dare. We are taken by the shoals through flatlands of moonlit gloom or sunlit filtering: stones, weeds and schools. When the new wave hit in 1978 it must have looked like a passing comedy to the author of Wisdom. As it subsided into undertow for the next new wave, did its former majesty stand up to scrutiny? Was it surpassing good? Wondrous was its crest against the sky, froth and bubble its most exorbitant after effect, plunged back into the daylight floor. Everywhere on our headlands and island bodies and far-reaching limbs new waves rush. The new wave of 1583, whence the men of London went into new found waters. What are we to make of these expansions and contractions? Everyone has dreamt of the Queen. The new wave of 330 may hold us in thrall, outstripping precedent. To think one Rome was not enough, they built another, as if the wave would never fall. Our landscape dreams, just as they appear moon-dry and explicable on paper, at the moment when they have reached their shelf-life, hear rain, or something like it, notice rising sighs of water, welcome the inevitable that is rushing as waves towards us, where we choose to be.  

Tidal Surge, Dust Wave No. 5 (Philip Hunter) (2007)