Sea

 

Yesterday the sea was a bristling flatness, thousands of tiny whitecaps and cat’s paws under duress of the west wind. Today the rains have come, turning all sights into grey rainfall to the shore, then temporary calm and its rainbows, then more rain setting in. Tomorrow above the Great Ocean Road I might spend time watching ships on the horizon, surfers under curls, dogs on the shore, if the rains go. Josep Pla, on the other hand, has trouble understanding what people find in the open sea that they can spend so long staring at it. He interviews a fisherman who spends more time staring at the sea than anyone else. When Pla pushes him about why he does this for such lengths of time, the fisherman replies, “I don’t know … I couldn’t say …” Pla calls this practice an enigma. One time he tries out Aeschylus’s phrase “The sea, ineffable smile,” on another old salt, only to be rebuked with “Have you ever seen the sea smile?” Pla concludes, this may be no more than a literary turn of phrase, a futile fiction. He refers to Lord Byron’s adjectives for the sea, in the French translation. And his Catalan hero Eugeni d’Ors, aka Xenius: “The sea, in its stark nakedness.” This puts me in mind of other short definitions, for example Marianne Moore’s forbidding poem on the subject, entitled ‘A Grave’. James Reeves says “the sea is a hungry dog,” and any amount of ink has flowed on what Homer means by “the wine dark sea.” Leaving us to come up, like Pla, with our own very short definitions of this vastest expanse on Earth. His diary of 1918-1919 ‘Quadern Gris’ (‘The Gray Notebook’) was finally translated from Catalan nearly one hundred years afterwards. I wonder if he ever softened towards the sea? He finds it horrible, without beauty, tiresome, “a harsh, horrendous form assumed by nature.” One wonders if, aged 22 on the day of this entry 30^th September 1919, he is not indulging in youthful playful dispute, honing his wits with university friends in Barcelona. If you must get into dialectic on a subject, what bigger or graver than the sea? “The open sea on its own is horrendous, oppressive, and unpleasantly sterile,” Pla writes, an unusual position to take if you think most of life came out of the fertile sea. However, this subjective mood changes when he looks at sea in relation to land, stating that “a mixture of land and sea is magnificent – a continuous, surprising source of beauty.” Soon he is writing in superlatives, admiring how this mixture is the essential element of beauty ascribed to Catalonia’s seaside towns and most particularly Barcelona itself, where it is “one of the most beautiful things about the city.” I put down his book to look again at the sea, that primary fact of existence, never primarily an aesthetic proposition. What is the right word for sea, if you can only have one word? Below that grey wintry plane that has no straight borders, that can be all horizon and no straight lines, entire worlds exist we can hardly imagine, unaware of our right word, our changing opinions.