The pelagic self
Starting with the sea
Some 50 million years ago, the ancestor of the sperm whale went back into the water, waving goodbye to the constraints of terrestrial life, bringing along its mammalian features. Water is the essence of life, and the price of living outside of it is that you are condemned to carry it with you, a water boulder for a thirsty Sisyphus. The marine mammals are stuck with another penance, the obligation to resurface, never getting to fully merge with the water.
One of the crazy things about water is that it adds a third movement dimension otherwise only accessible to winged entities. Whereas on land we mostly see tetrapods, this environment allows for more fundamentally different body plans. Even for humans, one of the underrated parts of diving is that it's so rare to go up and down as you wish when you move on a 2d plane all the time. And it's a place where currents have more say than winds about where our bodies should go.
The main thing for me is that the sea is reassuring. I grew up alongside it and will probably die there too.
The sea has the allure of things that do not fall silent at night-time, and grant our unquiet lives permission to sleep; a promise that everything is not doomed to disappear for ever, like the night light of small children who feel less lonely when it glimmers.Pleasures and Days, Marcel ProustOne of my favorite sources of inspiration, the greatest documentary series ever produced about the sea and its inhabitants, is The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. These guys were the renaissance men of the sea, they invented scuba diving, built their own submersibles, documented unknown environments, and introduced more people to the ocean than any other media.
The sea surface keeps no mark of things that have happened, you cannot tell the past from the present. Yet, it's moving always, tamed only by the moon. And sometimes there is no horizon and you can't tell the sky from the sea and the boundary never existed.
Alan Watts used to say you are something the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing. It's sometimes close to shore, or to the bottom of itself. Sometimes just sea all around. Drunk postman of messages in bottles, lonely witness to shipwrecks, muscular lifter of 50 ton whales. A water molecule and a quadrillion quadrillion friends.
Above all, the sea is poetry. Words are not good enough to describe factually, these are experiences that must be felt. It's a place where you can stop moving and fly. It's also a place where humans have less precise abstractions and concepts, with space for more mystery and wonder. And in fact, the map is mostly water.
I love you, sea.
The Donator wreck – my dad took this picture
Lacanau, France – my favorite surf beach
Îlot Maître, Nouvelle-Calédonie – sea turtles!
Pic du Cap Roux – most beautiful view of the Côte d'Azur
