Oceanic

 

Oceans suck. Oceans topple. Wild and uncomprehending and stupid and carefree as we are in our youth we do not think about the ocean as we plunge through its waves, line after line of the bruisers, salt in our eyes and foam up our noses, in the summertime of every happiness and little of lastingness. As we drip through the shallows toward another sheer clearness that may rush us through escalating seconds of cruise or dump us in a storm of sand and back current, we never think of the intricate capillaries almost infinite under the skin, the sunshine drying off the sea film from shoulders in a minute, the otherworld of science fiction action only fifty yards further out beneath the blue top. And it, swirly ocean, not a day older or younger. Gentle beings so rough and blithe and independent of the world, who splash into that turbulent form as if it were toyland, who rinse the past out in a trice, we were innocent and lovely and fed. But what might be the moment when we will yearn for gentleness we always had, be found dependent on the world back at the shoreline, where we look now with our goggles on? Knowingly, we are not drawn further out into that bluer depth, are stopped by the excuse of pleasure, by adult words of warning long since noted in electron and muscle, and held firm by that other mass, the great multihued airy fixture, that standout freewheeling bodily entity of safety, that stern containment called land. The years, talkative as per usual, teach us the truisms of a blue planet. Oceans confuse. Oceans ruin. When not a sight of recurrent wonder, their shapes can be some great tedium, like the year at the end of a failed marriage, the movie where the genius director lost the plot, the dormant doldrums that once roused therapy cannot shake off. The swell is building up now to troughs, so what. The day will be as flat as you could hope for, so what. The ripple on that crest could have been a dolphin, so what.   We might for now like to turn away from all that horizon, stop guessing the name of every passing vessel, take refuge in the happily multiplying possibilities of a room. Had we but thought, in a previous century, with the wisdom of foresight, every day we were having a conversation with the blue that, heatedly, belatedly forsooth, has found a way of getting out of hand. Oceans rise. Oceans expand. Gentle beings so attentive and technological, who read of tidal storms and drowning islands on handheld screens, who cannot connect in our highly evolved minds the words melting and icecap, discover for the first time in some time the logic of record temperatures and colossal inundations. Being talked back to takes some time, quite a time, to adjust to, staring at the ground for the words to say. Words that are feeble apologies directed at most of the world’s water, bewildered poetry in postmodern windspray manner, stunned blurts at breaking news, even though today is fine, winds light and variable, a perfect day for yachting or peering into rockpools and any amount of talking in our own tongue.