With a wrench and a twist, I pulled off the head. The muscles and oesophagus came away, dangling raw and red. Then I spread the body on a long piece of flotsam, laying out the bird on the knotted wood, under the grey sky.
Beautiful, but broken.
As the year slows to its midnight, the solstice blows in fierce and wild, the last of December putting up a fight. Day and night blur; it’s difficult to say when one becomes the other. In the glittering darkness long before dawn, a silver ring of ice is slung around the moon, catching stars and planets in its circle. Their heavenly bodies hang in the O: orbits within orbits, eyes within eyes. I swim through the inky sea, my white body breaking the black surface, moving through the moon.
The tide is high again. It often is here, more than most places, since Southampton Water experiences an unusual double tide, standing twice as high and twice as low every day, swelled and drained by the Atlantic Pulse that drives up and down the Channel. In David Copperfield, Dickens’s watery, autobiographical book, Mr Peggotty, mindful of his ‘drowndead’ relations, says of Mr Barkis, ‘People can’t die, along the coast … except when the tide’s pretty nigh out. They can’t be born, unless it’s pretty nigh in – not properly born, till flood. He’s a going out with the tide.’ The rise and fall brings life and death beyond our control. When the moon is full, the tide is high at noon and midnight, like a clock. The tide is time; the two words share the same root, as does tidy. We are all tidied up by time.
I stand on what is left of the sea wall in the moonlight, charged by its brightness. Apparently Siberian shamans would strip naked during the full moon to absorb its energy; maybe it’ll warm me with its secondhand daylight. The satellite silences our world; it has mysterious powers, as Bernd Brunner notes, still not quite explained, like black holes or gravity itself: some scientists believe the lunar effect extends to the land too, triggering earthquakes as though the planet’s tectonic slides were tides of their own.
And if our home is a living thing, then the sea is its pumping heart, swelling as the moon swings around the earth, tugging at our blood, at the tide inside of me. After all, the entire planet consists mostly of water, like us, and we are governed by its cycles more powerfully than by any elected body. Its tides are our future. They are always racing ahead, every day an hour further on, a reminder that we will never catch up with ourselves, no matter how fast we may swim.
But then, for me every day is an anxiety in my ways of getting to the water. I worry that something will stop me from reaching it, or that one day it won’t be there – as it is, and it isn’t, twice a day. I’ve become so attuned to it, so scared of it, so in love with it that sometimes I think I can only think by the sea. It is the only place I feel at home, because it is so far away from home. It is the only place where I feel free and alive, yet I am shackled to it and it could easily take my life one day, should it choose to do so. It is liberating and transforming, physical and metaphysical. Without its energy, we would not exist. There is nothing so vast in our lives, so beyond our temporal power. If there were no oceans, would we have our souls? ‘The sea has many voices | Many gods and many voices,’ T.S. Eliot wrote. ‘We cannot think of a time that is oceanless.’ ‘In civilisations without boats,’ said Michel Foucault, ‘dreams dry up.’ Even if we could live without the oceans, a world of arid plains and dry valleys would lack mystery; everything would seem knowable, exposed.
In the womb we swim in salty water, sprouting residual fins and tails and rudimentary gills as we twist and turn in our little oceans. It was a tradition in maritime communities that if a child was born with the amniotic sac, the caul, over its head, she or he would never drown, having survived this near-suffocation. To be born thus was to be ‘born behind the veil’, and a preserved caul – itself a veil between life and death – would extend protection to anyone who carried it: David Copperfield is born with a caul which is auctioned when he is ten years old, leaving him uncomfortable and confused at having part of himself sold off. We first sense the world through that fluid filling our mother’s belly; we hear through the sea inside her. The sea is an extension of ourselves. We speak of bodies of water, and Herman Melville wrote of ‘the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin’. Compared to the thin epidermis of land we occupy, the great volume of the sea exceeds our sway; it lends our planet its depth, and ourselves a sense of depth.
And if we are mostly water, hardly here at all, then other celestial bodies might be entirely aquatic. An astrophysicist once told me about newly discovered exoplanets that may be composed of water hundreds of kilometres deep, with only a few rocks at their hard core. Disdaining our need for land, these globular oceans, spinning translucently in some distant galaxy, may be inhabited, as astrobiologists hypothesise – it being their business to study that which may or may not exist – by giant whale-like creatures, half-swimming, half-flying through their atmospheres.
The ubiquity of the sea – from this grey estuary in which I swim, to the great open oceans – is itself interplanetary, connecting us to the stars, not really part of our world at all. It doesn’t begin until it begins, and then it never seems to end. It writes itself in the clouds and the currents, a permanently changing script, inscribing and erasing its own history, held down by air and gravity in a tacit agreement between land and sky, filling the space in between. It’s a nothingness full of life, home to ninety per cent of the earth’s biomass, providing sixty per cent of the oxygen we breathe. It is our life-support system, our greater womb. It is forever breaking its own boundaries, always giving and always taking. It is the embodiment of all our paradoxes. Without it we couldn’t live, within it we would die. The sea doesn’t care.
Down there lies another history, the unseen record of what is going on up above. Preserved in the freezing vaults of the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton are sample cores from the sea bed, long columns of mud and sediment whose layers tell out deep time like the rings in a tree or the waxy plugs in a whale’s ear. Composed of falls of marine snow – minute animals and plants and minerals, the makings of limestone- and chalk-to-be – along with dark strata deposited by ancient tsunamis, their past is our future foretold. The water itself has an age, up to four thousand years old, a story of its own. And even if the sea has become a carbon sink, absorbing the energy we have released from the sun, this cistern of our sins is still the repository of our dreams.
But as I just told you, the sea doesn’t care. It deals life and death for innocent and guilty alike.
The Tempest, Shakespeare’s last and most watery play, was first performed at court for James I on All Saints’ Day, 1611. It opens uproariously, slapping the audience in the face with a life-threatening storm and ‘fraughting souls’ on a ship about to split. In the dramatic tumult, panic spreads blame. Antonio, the usurping Duke of Milan, curses the boatswain – who is trying to save the ship – as a ‘wide-chopped rascal – would thou mightst lie drowning | The washing of ten tides!’ He is arrogantly invoking the practice of hanging pirates on the shore, leaving their corpses to swing in successive tides: ‘He that’s born to be hanged need fear no drowning.’
Yet, as the audience slowly becomes aware, these scenes of rip, wreck and panic – overturning all order as the crew fight for their lives and the aristocrats’ status counts for nothing in the face of the waves: ‘What cares these roarers for the name of king?’ – turn out to be nothing more than a magic trick, a theatrical effect within a theatrical effect, a storm raised by a sorcerer’s art and his impish familiar. As Ferdinand, the king’s son, his hair up-staring, leaps from the sinking