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THERISINGSEA

Not long ago but long enough, I looked into the old cupboard in my bedroom and at the back, among the piles of floppy discs and peeling spines of my children’s encyclopaedias, I found a notebook. It was in an old-fashioned imperial format, half-bound with blue cloth and shiny paper, its fore-edge delicately spattered like a blackbird’s egg. It came from the cable factory where my father had worked all his life. Inside, on feint-lined pages intended for notes on amps and electrical resistance, were writings and drawings I’d done when I was about fifteen years old.

On each left-hand page was a picture, in bright poster paint: a futuristic city, art deco designs, lithe figures out of some space opera or Russian ballet; fantastical images I’d collected in my teenage head. Halfway through the book I’d painted something I’d really seen: a leaping killer whale, slick with clear nail varnish to mimic its black-and-white skin, as if it had jumped out of the sea, rather than a concrete pool in a suburban safari park.

On the right-hand pages I’d composed lyrics and prose, the things I couldn’t say out loud. Looking at this parade of longings forty years later, I realised that the fifteen-year-old me had mapped out his life along those pale blue lines. As if I’d already lived in reverse. Everything that came after had been entered in that blue notebook, balanced on my knees while I watched television in our front room, waiting for whatever might come next.

The wind howled at my window like a wild animal, a snarling beast demanding to be fed. The house held fast against horizontal rain that threatened to find every crack in the walls. The air was full of water, driven directly from the shore. Between the falling trees and the pounding waves, it seemed that the sea – for all that it was a mile away or more – was reaching out for me in the darkness. The newspapers and the television and the websites warned us not to walk near it, as if our mere approach might be dangerous, as if its tentacles might reach out and drag us in.

Growling and yowling, ranting and rocking, falling back to catch their breath before their next assault, the storms kept on coming, and there was nothing we could do. The world had become turbulent with its own temper, its air sweeping over oceans in a tropical fury. If we ever felt guilty, we felt it now.

At least the sea is visible in its rage; the wind is an unseen monster. You don’t hear the wind; you hear what it leaves behind. It is defined by what gets in its way – trees, buildings, waves. Perhaps that’s why it preys on our imagination so disturbingly. The spinning of the globe seemed to have become audible – the sound of a world out of kilter. For what sins were we being punished? What had we done wrong? In Caribbean hurricanes during the seventeenth century, Spanish priests would toss crucifixes into the waves or hold the Host up into the wind, for fear that their sinful flocks were responsible for God’s displeasure.

That winter, storm after storm raked southern England. Tearing and snapping, the wind never seemed to stop. As I lay in bed, I could feel its volume whipping and squalling around me, changing direction wilfully, a mad car out of control.

Then, just when it seemed it could not get any worse, a mighty gale, as near as we might get to a hurricane, ripped out of the cover of night and into the naked day. Unable to sleep, disturbed by the charged air, as if its ions were crackling in my brain, I cycled down to the shore and took shelter under the eaves of the yacht club, a wooden building which seemed about to whirl off into the wind. Behind me stood a medieval abbey, and a fort once visited by the Virgin Queen to survey her maritime kingdom, its Tudor ramparts now protected from the waves by a long sea wall.

I’ve known this shore all my life: from its ancient Seaweed Hut – a weird structure which might as well have been put up by Iron Age inhabitants – to the brutal towers of its nineteen-sixties housing estate. It is as familiar to me as it is to the birds that scrabble for their livelihoods in its shingle and mud. I’d taken it for granted, that it would always be there.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The beach was being torn apart before my eyes. The wall, usually only lapped even at the highest spring tide, was entirely overwhelmed. Waves – to call them waves seems pathetically inadequate – had lost their laterality and gone vertical, rising higher than a house.

My world had lost its moorings. This was not some rocky Cornish or Scottish coast, buttressed against such a battering; this was a sedate, suburban shore, complacent and unprepared; a soft place on the southern edge of England, open to the rest of the world, successively invaded and settled for millennia. This estuary even had its own Roman deity, Ancasta. Clearly, she had been offended.

It was as though someone had computer-generated the weather and ramped it up to a ridiculous degree. An invisible alien, formed of roaring air and raging water, had been unleashed. The sea spray reached the tops of the trees on the shore. It was terrifying, and exhilarating. My heart raced to keep up with every rattling rolling rumble; a cacophony created by raked-up shingle and creaking trees, the Foley effects of enraged gods flinging nature around.

I watched it like some viral video; not rerun, but in real time. Behind this frontline, people were driving cars, taking buses, going to work, school, shops, locked in their own personal climate. We shared the same city; but they felt safe, seeing the storm through their screens. I was on the edge of it, physically confronted by the violence, as shocking as if I’d come across a fist fight on the street.

The sea wall had been replaced by a wall of sea. The placid site where I propped up my bike every morning, where I’d leave my clothes and slip into the water, joining rather than entering it, had become a deadly, repulsive place.

It was the only day during those storms that I did not, could not swim; perhaps the only day that year. Even at the height of the past days’ disruption I’d launched myself into the madness, defying the warnings. So what if anything went wrong? I didn’t take my mobile phone in case of emergency because I don’t have one. People say I should be careful; but why be careful, when we are so full of cares? This was the opposite of that. I glorified in my stupidity. Foolhardy, a hardy fool. I had rocked with the waves, holding my head above water like a shipwrecked dog, dodging planks and plastic buckets. A single trainer had floated past, then a motorbike helmet; I wondered if the head might still be in it. I was borne up by the rollercoaster ride, exultant and excited, although I had soon found myself spat back onshore.

Not that day. That day I had to admit defeat, and defer to a greater power.

During the night the wind woke me again, prowling around the house like a midnight demon, ready to suck me out of the window. The sound was beyond sound: one white noise comprised of many others, fit to eviscerate my dreams.

In the morning, not quite believing what had happened during the darkness – was that last night, or the night before; did I even imagine it? – I ventured out on the third day of the storm, expecting to see a newly devastated world.

But the streets looked the same, just as they do when you come back from holiday. Only a few fallen branches from the trees hinted at the mayhem of the small hours. I rode on down to the beach, not knowing what to expect, but expecting it anyway.

There I realised that the storm had taken its final revenge. Defeated by what it could do inland, it had reshaped the coast itself.

The beach had been lifted up and thrown back, creating a shingle tsunami. The path had been replaced by a tangle of branches and rope, a twisted mass of line and grass torn from some other shore, in the way drowned men’s pockets are turned inside out. The flotsam lay still, but contorted with the torque and tension of the wind and water. Tiny balls of coloured plastic, like the roe of some new petrochemical sea creature, were scattered through the wrackline. The calm itself was violent.

Then I saw the sea wall. The waves had fallen back to reveal their guilty secret. The long straight stalwart of my pre-dawn swims, my chilly changing place, my launching point from the land, had been smashed to pieces, kicked over by a petulant child. The wall had stood for seventy years or more, made of the same stone that had built the abbey and fort behind it. Now, like the abbey, it lay in ruins.

I took it personally. A structure I knew as well as my own body had been reduced to rubble. And I knew I was responsible. I had allowed this to happen.

No one would ever rebuild this place, this insignificant corner, bypassed by ships and cars. The aftermath of this assault was the reality of ‘managed retreat’, in the bureaucrats’ parlance; the desertion of an already forgotten site. We had abandoned beauty, abandoned nature. This was the future: the rising sea on a suburban shore. I wanted to cry, but the hardness of the stone stopped me. So I picked my way over the remains, pulled off my clothes, and got in.

The sea was still filled with debris; household doors and tree trunks floated like lumber thrown from a giant’s outhouse. And even as I swam, the waves began to rise again, responding to an invisible moon. Giving up the struggle, I climbed out, fighting to get dressed as the wind whipped my clothes into air-filled versions of me.

I rode off into a new landscape. Time had sped up; geological change happened overnight. New streams had been formed and new islands created in the flood. Reluctant to let me go, the waves lashed me as I passed.

Frail as I am as a human, I had the ability to withstand the storm. But along this coast, thousands of seabirds died in those few days, ten thousand guillemots alone. Birds that mate for life waited for partners who would never return.

That afternoon I found a dead guillemot on the beach. Its slender-sharp bill and black-brown body lay slumped on the shingle like a soft toy lost over the side of a passing ferry. It was so perfect – and so far from the rocky ledges where it breeds so close to its fellows that they preen one another, even though they are not partners – that I wondered if I should take it home with me. I talked to it, commiserating with its fate. The next tide claimed it – only to bring another victim, rolled about in nylon line.

I pulled it out. It was an avocet. A delicate, emblematic bird I’d only ever seen from afar, suddenly brought into near focus, graphically black and white, a piece of netsuke. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so exquisite, there in my hands. I turned it over in my fingers, feeling its long, scaly legs – relics of its reptilian past – and their knobbly joints like threaded veins, or worms that had swallowed soil. It was their colour that amazed me: an indefinable, pearly blue-mauve withheld under a soft misty bloom; electric, verging on iridescent. I could only compare it to the oceanic blue-grey of a gannet’s bill, as if this were a marine colour reserved for a seabird’s exclusive use. The legs, which might have been made out of some alien metal or art nouveau glass, culminated in tiny black claws, embedded like chips of polished jet.

It was an enamelled animal. Vitrified. As much jewellery as a live, or recently dead, thing. It was hard to believe it had stood on such fragile stilts, let alone stalked its prey from them. Then I remembered the living avocets I’d seen, moving with eighteenth-century elegance, as if they might dance a gavotte. Avocets enact their own rituals, gathering in a circle and bowing to one another like dandies.

I opened the bird’s wings, a pair of fans fluttering across a ballroom. They felt taut with what they were expected to do; not yet quite useless, yet no use now, either. They articulated lightness and lift. The black-capped head, which once bobbed in the shallows, sweeping through the water with its upturned bill, ended in the final, defining, typographical tick that is the avocet’s glory. It was almost too beautiful to touch, but I prised open the ebony splint, like the split reed of a musical instrument. Its lower half was precisely ridged to speed its ploughing; a keratin tool engineered to micron perfection, tapering to a paper-thin tip, as sharp as a squid’s beak. I remembered the sound that played through it, a shapely insistent peep, accompanying the nervously graceful movement as the creature swung its bill from side to side in search of invertebrates. Even the bird’s binomial expressed its exotic allure – Recurvirostra avosetta, as if it were a minor Egyptian god.

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 vessel set aflame by Ariel’s divided fire, he cries, ‘Hell is empty | And all the devils are here.’ (It is an image which may have been inspired by James I himself, author of Demonologie and personal supervisor of the torture of witches, who believed that during a voyage back from Oslo in 1590 his ship had been beset by storms summoned by witchcraft, and demons had been sent to climb its keel.)

Suddenly, and as if in a dream, the castaways find themselves in an eerie calm, on an island full of strange noises, peopled by beings they cannot quite discern; an alien place, although the survivors themselves are aliens too. Some of its spirits are only rumoured, like Sycorax the witch, named after sys for sow, and korax for raven, a fated bird from an ‘unwholesome fen’. Others are all too present, like her son Caliban, a bastard creation, ‘a savage and deformed slave’, amphibious, half-man, half-fish, ‘Legged like a man! And his fins like arms!’ He is a chimeric creature, as if slithering out of an evolutionary sea; his counterpart is Ariel, an ambivalent, fluid spirit of the air who eludes definition and can be anywhere in an instant. Both are ruled over by the all-powerful magician Prospero in his water-bound exile.

Recently, on a shelf of stranded books being sold to benefit a bird sanctuary overlooking the Solent, I discovered a 1968 Penguin edition of the play. It was an oddly apt place to find it: this silted-up seventeenth-century harbour, overflown by marsh harriers and stalked by godwits and avocets, was the domain of the Earl of Southampton – Harry Southampton, Shakespeare’s Fair Youth and possibly his lover, who lived at nearby Titchfield Abbey, where the playwright’s works were performed.

I paid fifty pence for the book, attracted by its cover, designed by David Gentleman. Splashed with broad swathes of solid colour, the wood engraving, inspired by the work of Thomas Bewick, seemed to span the turbulent year of its nineteen-sixties publication – when protestors lifted up pavement stones, to find the beach below – and the uncertainties of its seventeenth-century contents.

A three-masted ship tilts in a stylised sea, rolling on waves below stormy clouds towards a tree-blown island and a rocky cave, all rendered in sludgy, overlapping shades of subdued blue and green, grey and teal, like the birds and land and sea around the building where I’d bought the book. The design was almost cartoon-like, folkloric, and layered. It caught the dark mystery and music of the words within.

The Tempest is a ceremony, a ritual in itself, publicly performed in a sky-open theatre on the site of the Blackfriars monastery on the Thames, a river into which sacrifices were once thrown to propitiate the gods. It is a pared-back, mysterious work, ‘deliberately enigmatic’, as Anne Righter says in her introduction to the Penguin edition, ‘an extraordinarily secretive work of art’, so emblematic that it might be acted out in mime, without any words at all.

Its origins lay in the fate of Sea Venture, which sank off Bermuda in 1609 while carrying colonists from Plymouth to Jamestown; Harry Southampton himself was an investor in the Virginian settlement. Shakespeare drew on William Strachey’s account of the wreck, a natural history of disaster, with its tales of St Elmo’s fire at the height of the storm – ‘an apparition of a little round light, like a faint Starre, trembling, and streaming along with a sparkling blaze’ – and the eerie calls of petrels coming in to roost, ‘a strange hollow and harsh howling’. Their cries earned Bermuda its reputation as an island of devils, one which Strachey rationally dismissed, although he did acknowledge the presence of other monsters: ‘I forbear to speak what a sort of whales we have seen hard aboard the shore.’

The Tempest is the closest Shakespeare comes to the New World. It is almost an American play, although two centuries later its castaways might have been washed up on another colony: Van Diemen’s Land, on whose remote south-western shores one can still imagine a seventeenth-century shipwreck and its stranded sailors stumbling about on the alien sand. Some saw Caliban and Ariel as symbolic representations of newly-discovered native peoples, whose countries were already being plundered by the West; others have seen a reflection of an island nearer to home: Ireland, a troublesome place filled with its own wild people, and regarded as a plantation to be conquered. But equally, Prospero’s isle might be utopia, a nowhere place over which his magic rises as a mist veiling time and space – just as a century earlier, Columbus, researching his expedition, had written notes and marginalia about strange people cast up on the shores of the Azores and the west of Ireland: ‘We have seen many notable things and especially in Galway, in Ireland, a man and a woman with miraculous form, pushed along by the storm on two logs.’

Shakespeare, nearing the end of his life, appeared to have recreated himself in the omniscient magician; others have seen Prospero as a reflection of Elizabeth I’s astrologer, John Dee, who communed with angels using a golden disc, and peered into his black obsidian mirror – stolen from the New World – in order to see the future and the past. The whole play seems to be happening before it was written. It is fraught in the original sense of the word, as a ship filled with freight, as well as with meaning. Shakespeare was familiar with the ocean: he refers to it more than two hundred times in his works, and some critics believe that he was once a sailor. Certainly he knew its meaning, and set The Tempest on a ‘never-surfeited sea’, a transformative place. After the storm, Ariel tells Ferdinand that his father, the king, lies ‘full fathom five’; he has been made immortal by the water, becoming a baroque jewel in the process:

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes;

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

For the artists and poets who came after, The Tempest lingered in its magical power and deceptive simplicity. Samuel Taylor Coleridge thought that Prospero’s art ‘could not only call up the spirits of the deep, but the characters as they were and are and will be’, and that Ariel was ‘neither born of heaven, nor of earth; but, as it were, between both’. For Percy Shelley, who would be nicknamed Ariel, the play evoked ‘The murmuring of summer seas’ and his own in-between state. And for John Keats, in whose volumes of Shakespeare’s works the play was the most heavily scored, it became a pattern for his imaginative life, like a map to be followed. Indeed, he sailed down Southampton Water with The Tempest in his pocket.