Across a Continent and a Sea

I unpacked, made some tea, and sat down at the plain wooden table in front of the sea-facing window. I gazed out from my cliff-top accommodation. I was drawn here because I wanted a week of wide water and Irish wind. I knew that the sea would be my ally, a source of inspiration and an uncompromising mirror for my restless mind.

I focussed on the aims of my retreat: to become more present, to observe more closely, to let the ocean observe me.

From a cliff, the sea can be a promise of possibility or an invitation to end it all, I thought.

I didn’t feel depressed, but I was harbouring doubt. Doubts about myself, doubts about my life-direction. I wasn’t going to jump, but I needed to make a leap.

On the table in front of me I studied a map of the Munster coastline. It looked as if the ragged edge of Ireland was digging into the ocean like an animal paw. Several slender peninsulas reached out into the expanse of the Atlantic and Celtic seas. I couldn’t work out whether the land was holding on for dear life or boldly pulling itself in a new direction.

I’m cradled in the Claws of Munster.

I felt uneasy. There were two thousand miles of water to the west of me. I could look out over it for the next week or so: a luxury of space in which to witness the weather, to track the boats coming and going, to monitor my mind-full-mess. These were the perfect conditions for diving deeper.

Here’s the practice: do nothing, stare at the sea.

Both things sounded simple; both things profoundly difficult.

It didn’t take long for the existential questions to bubble up:

What’s going on with this ship of a life? Holding on or moving forward? In a harbour, anchor-bound, or setting sail? Where’s my chart and compass? …OK, admit it – I’m all at sea.

I looked out of the window again. The day was fading. The lighthouse across the water, on Sheep’s Head, flashed three times, paused for three beats and flashed again. The cloud-cut end of a rainbow moved from Bear Island out past Mizen Head. A red and yellow boat towed the sunset into Castletownbere. Steam rose up from my mug of spiced apple tea as three nightlights flickered on my windowsill shrine. Beyond these local points of orientation there was nothing familiar. Outside was a sky I couldn’t decipher. There was the illusory line where air meets water.

The horizon is a sad shaped sleeping cloud.

In my notebook I remembered I had written down a quote by George Szirtes:

Hungarian fairy tales begin not with Once upon a time, but with Egyszer volt, hol nem volt, túl az Óperencián, translated roughly as, Once there was, then there wasn’t, somewhere beyond the great ocean. The ocean is a myth the size of a real ocean.

In Hungarian folk tales the Óperencias Sea denotes that unknown place beyond the edge of the world. It’s the place where myths are born. The horizon indicates the edge of reason.

It’s a liminal underline.

The magnitude of myth was starting to feel overwhelming. I blew out the candles
and went to bed.

*

The next morning, when I woke up, the sea was still there. I had needed a night of going nowhere. I went outside and threw down some stale bread onto the porch. I wondered what birds would turn up. It felt good to come back to something small.

I made coffee, sat at the table again and peered out to the porch. The bread I had put out was being eaten systematically by a rat. It was fussy about which pieces it took. It didn’t just gobble the lot. It sniffed around like a rodent breadcrumb connoisseur. It was being selective and surviving.

Rats have attitude. What’s my attitude?

The rat was teaching me something about how hard it is to stay with whatever is manifesting in the moment. I was both fascinated and repulsed by the rat. I observed my mind always slipping to the side of pleasure and safety, away from discomfort and risk.

I’d rather have a familiar rat than an unfamiliar ocean. But, then again, I’d rather have a sweet sparrow than a wretched rodent.

One of the key teachings of Buddhism: mindfulness. With the right attention a rat is neither pleasant nor unpleasant, it’s just a rat.

Zen rodent practice. 

*

By the afternoon, I needed to get out and walk. I was getting cabin fever.

Ratty.

On my cliff-top ramble I disturbed a kestrel in the fine fault-line crack of the rocks. She flew up, alarming the gulls, who scattered and screeched. Then a crowd of crows circled in to warn off the kestrel. A seal’s head popped up from the sea, curious, checking things out.

Maybe seals are naturally mindful.

Surely whales are the most present creature in the sea.

I found a hollow nook to sit in at the bottom of the cliff face. Looking closely, I saw what I assumed was fossilised moss in the rock. I studied the patterns.

The beauty of inexact repetition.

Rats, rocks, oceans, birds: all paths to freedom.

I breathed in/breathed out. I was starting to feel less disconnected.

I got up from the nook and began to make my way back. After a few paces I stopped and stood still. There was a sound. I wondered if it was the rush of blood to my head or the drain of blood to my feet. I was disconcerted but didn’t feel dizzy. The sound was all around me, immersive, sudden and tactile.

A complexity of white noise.

I realised I was starting to hear the sea.

My ears are arriving.

*

Back at the house I picked up Amplitude, the Tess Gallagher poetry anthology I’d brought with me. I had become interested in Gallagher as I knew she was the partner and wife of Raymond Carver, a writer I admired. I had carried around his poem Late Fragment, in my notebook, for years. It has the famous opening line, ‘And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so?’

The question haunted me. I wasn’t getting what I wanted. I didn’t even know what I wanted.

I opened Amplitude and read the poem ‘Present’. The setting of the piece is Round Mountain in Washington State on the far north-west coast of the United States. The protagonist is Tess Gallagher’s mother. She has become briefly separated from her logger husband – who is in the forest, cutting trees – and falls into a reverie of beauty. She has a realisation:

Then it came to me, like the mountain had told
me, and I knew it was over. One waiting was
over. And another was starting.

It’s her first conscious moment of pregnancy. Something deep inside her had been happening without her knowing it. Now she knew it, and in that knowing was the birth of more than one; the creation of ‘We’. A mother and her inseparable embryo. She realises she now knows something that her husband has yet to know. She savours his not knowing and the unique instant, before she shares the news with him.

I thought about my own mother.

How did the realisation of Roger happen? Was it sudden or gradual? Did she wonder if she was having a boy or a girl? Had she already thought of possible names? Who did she tell first – her friends or my father?

I remembered that my mother told me once I was conceived on honeymoon, in Paris. I have always loved that detail. It makes me feel part Parisian, even though I was born in rural Shropshire.

I put the poetry book down and looked out over the sea again. I could feel my mother’s presence. Her ghost-cells in my own body. I sensed her sadness and joy, her living presence, her aliveness, her theatricality. I sensed her love of me and her freedom from me. I felt my love of her and my freedom from her.

Birth is nothing but bittersweet.

I carried on watching the coming and going of boats.

Boats are nothing but bittersweet.

I made more tea, picked up my pen and wrote a poem in my notebook:

Trawler

(For Tess Gallagher)

It’s a small cream boat
but it looks bigger in the bay,
the bay of white whispered edges
and stone-wrinkled fingers.

In the time it takes
to cross the dusk
there have been no others.
Though faraway words have set sail.

Watching a boat, reading a book:
someone else’s memories
have become mine,
caught in my open net.

A woman has been held back
by the sheer beauty of the forest,
then felt the first pulse
of her conception leaping forward

to the man ahead logging
timber, smelling of saw sap,
slowly becoming aware,
of her coming into shape.

Reading a book, watching a boat:
journeys enter me,
cargo has come across:
unfamiliar cache from the sea.

The lighthouse reaches me
at my window. Later
I will watch the night ships
go out in search of stories.

By the time I had finished, the lighthouse was starting to flash again. I sank into the armchair.

For now, no-one else knows I have written this poem. Like Tess Gallagher’s pregnant mother in the forest, it’s just something in me. I could just burn it in the belly of the stove.

*

The retreat came to an end. I didn’t burn the poem. I kept it, sensing it held something of the essence of my time on that Dzogchen claw of Munster. I took the poem home: my own cargo of contemplation.

*

A few weeks later, back home in Manchester, I thought again of Tess Gallagher. How she had reached me, across the ocean, how her poem had touched me. I felt the need to reach back.

On an impulse I emailed her publisher and asked if they would forward my poem to her. I was surprised to get a message back from her.

Dear Roger,

My press forwarded your lovely poem on to me. So eerie how poems decide to merge like that, isn’t it?

I literally watch “the night ships” from my bed here on the Strait of Juan de Fuca. They are like big birthday cakes floating out there at times in the dark. Or last night, one that blasted piercingly its white spotlight intensity my way, then turned the blast sideways into reflected water-glimmer.

I like the pensive quality of your poem… the way it lets itself float free of its bits and pieces. Thank you for sharing this.

Unexpected in my day, when I am tending the mother about whom I wrote that poem so long ago. She is ailing now and in my 24-hr care. But I’m lucky to be with her, for however long. It was a gift to be reminded of the poem I wrote for her about my conception.

Fond best, across a continent and a sea

– Tess Gallagher, 9th July 2005.

 

I was moved by her generous response, touched by the connection.

Then I cried. I wanted a living letter from my mother too. I cried because I never had the chance to tend to her in her old age. I cried because her boat left early and because there are so many stories we couldn’t share.

Tess Gallagher’s letter brought back a flood of memories from Dzogchen Beara. I decided to open my digital photo folder from the trip. One image stood out: a grey cloud dropping pale rain onto dark water. I wondered if that’s what the Óperencias Sea looks like. The horizon is infinitely ambiguous.

It could be a black ash walkway leading to a secret waterhole.

Or, maybe it’s the place where words are born.

TOP IMAGE:

Ibby Lanfear
‘Traces: high tide (cuttlefish and porpoise)’
Charred cuttlebone in linseed oil on gesso and oak

This drawing is part of an ongoing series inspired by the Tibetan concept of shul, as described by Rebecca Solnit: ‘the impression of something that used to be there’. Medium is central to meaning and the work explores ideas of memory and story held within the visual and physical traces individuals of interdependent species leave behind. In this work two inter-reliant individuals are present: the one solely visually, the other in material form only. In death both demonstrate the extreme precarity of their entangled existence in the face of the combined threats of pollution, climate change, overfishing and habitat loss.

Ibby Lanfear is an environmental artist based in the UK. Her work is deeply rooted in the specific materiality of place, and she uses natural and waste stream materials to explore themes of species interdependence and kinship. Her drawings are held in public and private collections.

Credit: Tess Gallagher, excerpt from ‘Present’ from Amplitude: New and Selected Poems.
Copyright ©1987 by Tess Gallagher. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press, graywolfpress.org.
Letter from Tess Gallagher printed with her permission and blessing.

 

Dark Mountain: Issue 26 – Dark Ocean

Our Autumn 2024 issue is a full-colour exploration of the world's oceans in an era of collapse – in narrative, verse, art and photography.

 

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