Depths endless
The view of Jaffa from the sea — Google Arts & Culture
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Seated on the sand with my notebook on my knees in front of me. The sun hot on my back, the skin on the bottom of my feet cold. I’m here to do some thinking before I get in the ocean. But I feel now an urge to cry.
I haven’t cried at all, not meaningfully, in the three weeks I’ve been here. Not when I was lugging two flak jackets up those cobblestone streets in the rain. Not when the ambassador held my hand, paused and said in her accented English: If I have to send home another body – I have tried everything – they are lying to me. Not on cease-fire day, when I felt like I was being pulled thinner than a thread, like I was being asked, unjustly, to rise levels above my station. Not shivering at night in the bedroom of Steve’s freezing apartment in the German colony, lonelier than I’ve been in years. Not when the message came through that the doctor at Kamal Adwan had been shot and I thought about his clear, solid voice from the day before, cutting through the noise of the hospital into the phone, into my ear.
Not even yesterday, looking at Fakhri, weary old man, as he leaned back, eyes brimming, and said sincerely, when they destroyed my house, they destroyed my memories, my life. Rubble outside. He wiped the dust off the portrait he’d saved of his wife, Amina, from when she was young, dazzling, a princess at the University of Jordan. His Amina now in the hospital, sick from the destruction. It was a beautiful life, Fakhri kept saying. Was.
None of those times I cried. Only now, looking at the waves coming in on Jaffa, I feel my eyes hot and wet.
*
Before coming here, I had been home, reflecting on my year in sea, which has happily been quite productive. I sailed into the South China Sea twice, from Malaysia and the Philippines. I crossed the Sulu Sea on boat for the first time, swam in the Lombok Strait for the second time. I read a lot more, having always one sea book on the roster to accompany whatever else needed to be consumed.
Largely, where I’d arrived with all that was the sense that the sea was a place of surrender and that that was mostly good. Stories that begin with sea obsession often end with the same conclusion that it is too vast, too mystical, too awesome; that any relationship with it leads, eventually, to prostration. It wipes away anxiety, restores wonder. It dissolves estrangement, leaves humility. Every sailor is brought to her knees. These stories demonstrating there is more, just more, and in so doing, delivers a comforting feeling.
I.e. The Arctic Tern, a little bird, makes the longest migration on earth, going literally from pole to pole, flapping her wings for tens of thousands of miles without ever stopping. Or the whale, intelligent and depressed species, evolving originally from land-based mammals, meaning of a lineage of creatures that left the sea and then changed their minds and turned back toward it. Point Nemo, the single furthest place from land in the world, now a resting place for satellites and space stations at the end of their orbital lives. Think of this debris falling silently from the cosmos into the Pacific, unwitnessed.
How incredible, how surprising. What else could be possible, etc.
The ocean as an unknowable God, generously deep, abidingly there. It can inspire reverence, hold you up, draw you home. These were nice ideas that helped me understand myself and my position. But here now, facing the Mediterranean, they come across naive.
One of the effects of being in this place is seeing, forcefully, that all the problems you envision and consider inside your head about the world are bigger than imaginable. People are worse than can be understood. War is more horrific than can be redeemed. There are private losses. Fakhri’s house. But cast your eyes up and see suffering on a numerical, physical scale that is unfathomable. When writing for the job, I think about what is too gratuitous to include. But what is gratuitous about the truth? The body of a dead child is smaller than you think. That is the truth.
My spiritual crutches have not held up. My faith in what is good, my stand-in for God. And yet, I also know – and I strongly believe – what a waste of time it is to despair. It has no use. And so: Keep going.
“What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozzening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare?”
Captain Ahab, Moby-Dick 132
The saltwater bites at the little scars and scabs on my legs. Patches of dry skin; a nick from barbed wire; my usual blisters. It reminds me of earlier this year, swimming in the sea with my friends, being kissed all over our legs by jellyfish, laughing crazily about being alive next to these swarms of watery, translucent bells. The stinging feels so similar. I think now to myself: Perhaps it is the same.
*
A Jellyfish Like the Moon - Nagasawa Rosetsu — Google Arts & Culture
Google Arts & Culture features content from over 2000 leading museums and archives who have partnered with the Google Cultural Institute to bring the world's treasures online.
Notes
I recorded a podcast episode about sailing into the South China Sea
And wrote about sea migration for Naomi’s wonderful magazine, Gully
Learned about Arctic terns in “Migrations,” by Charlotte McConaghy
More about Point Nemo in this story in The Atlantic
“The Sea Around Us” by Rachel Carson changed my life
This email was written initially to Moses Sumney’s recent cover of the late musician SOPHIE’s “Is it cold in the water?” and then, toward the end, to SOPHIE’s original, on repeat.
Your friend,
Reb
