The sea, and me.

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“Moony types,” he notes, “get drawn to bodies of water. …

It’s because when you look out to sea, you’re looking at [an] … infinitude. … An infinitude … of nothingness.”

– Kevin Barry, Beatlebone, p.212.

Hmm, nothingness… or everything-ness? At least once a week that quote comes to me, a moony type, when I’m looking out to sea. Always the sea, always an fharraige, never ‘the Atlantic or ‘the ocean’ – indeed, an t-aigéan feels foreign on my tongue, like I’m always saying it wrong. Living on an island, the sea is all; before her, we are empowered, we are powerless.

I could try to describe her, but she’d have changed before I’d the sentence written. And anyways, I don’t think I have those kind of words. See, for me, the sea is best described in how she feels, what she does to us, internally and externally. The physical sensations, the mental shifts, and that which is neither – or both; her impact on character.

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Physically, first and foremost, she feels cold. She pinches, and stings. She shocks the body, appalls it. Our daily defibrillator. But she is gentle too, when she laps about bared toes or when we lounge upon her, staring up at the sky or, begoggled, studying the world beneath. Power and calm collide when she raises us up on the crest of a wave and holds us aloft like ballerinas, just for a moment, before lowering us again. Or when she breaks ashore, sometimes with might enough to knock a woman, sometimes with the shyness of a lamb.

There are different ways to ‘feel’ her. Her taste on my salted lips, my skin taut from all that’s carried on her winds, the lines beneath my eyes – for what chance had my skin against she who battered very islands into existence? I even feel her in the shiver that crosses my shoulders when I see waves crash off Inis Mór, powerful enough to scale Dún Aonghus, or in the tingle of my fingers at glimpse of a dolphin’s leap. Or in the swell of my chest – like delight ballooning behind my breastbone – when the night is clear, and trawlers seen are so far out they could be stars. When there is no light, and sea is the sole sound.

Did you know you can gasp through your nose? I do it regularly. On the morning boat, when the sea shimmers under a rising sun’s glow, on the evening boat in winter and early spring, a few miles out from Ros a’Mhíl when there’s nothing but sea and a sky; a cinema of twilight. I feel like I’ve swallowed something impossibly smooth when a clear evening shows the horizon splitting the universe in two. When beneath that line is a still sea of indigo and violet blues, and above is a glorious panorama of soft pinks and oranges that fade into timid silver, then darken to the navy of night and light and the half-light[1].

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But I don’t think Kevin Barry was on about weather-wrinkled eyes or whispered ohmyGods. I think he was on about the thoughts, the emotions, the perceptions that the sea intensifies. Two months ago, when we’d that hard frost, the full moon beamed a silver trail across Galway Bay so vivid I could imagine dancers waltzing upon its surface smooth as silk. Like I was seeing beyond the beyond, past where the explained ended. All those evenings, entranced, I thought I was nearer then than ever I might be to where Oisín went with Niamh, from where chroniclers of legend returned with pencils sharpened.

Her force, her beauty and her brilliance limber my imagination, readying it for the next idea. Every day she is like the canvas upon which I pitch notions and half-ideas, hoping the notions return as stories and the half-ideas come back as full ideas.

I think that being in proximity of might emboldens me. Beside the sea I am gloriously insignificant and that, in the most positive sense possible, is like being given space to fail. I can try anything; no matter the magnitude of failure or success, she will crash and thrash, tides will in, and tides will out. Try again, fail again she says, echoing Beckett. Then fail better. And do you know what? I do. And then I try again.

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When I am gone, and my life is elsewhere, thinking of the sea, I’ll think of the stretch between Inis Meáin and Connemara, in night and day. I’ll see the tail of the boat and the brilliant line it draws, and if I hear or feel a shudder on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, instinctively I’ll think it must be boat time. I’ll think of the space between the pier wall and the breakwater; the island’s front gate. I’ll think of all the times I crossed on the boat and I’ll be glad that nearly every time I sat out. My mind will wander to days when the boat’s trail reflected the sunlight, when churned water billowed out both sides. When the track left by the boat’s width was splayed long and wide like a highway back to Inis Meáin.

Gazing at her at eye-level, as often I do from Ceann Gainimh, is like peering in at the world from outside the window. Two worlds; that one behind the lavender frontier of the Twelve Bens, and this one here behind the sea. Here I am cosseted, sheltered within the sea’s perimeter; all within it is contained, manageable, knowable. Familiar. It’s why I stayed so long. It’s why I’ll go.  

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The sea giveth and the sea taketh, as well the islanders know. The spectrum of opinion on the sea runs from romance to respect; the islanders are hard-line respecters, I sit somewhere on the respectful end of romance. Kevin Barry, I think, sits somewhere near me, so I’ll leave the last word to him, to Beatlebone. Describing a fictionalised boat trip to Dorinish Island in Clew Bay, he says that in the Atlantic there are ‘sentimental forces at work.’

Are there? I can’t say I noticed.  

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[1] W.B. Yeats, Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven – full poem here

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