Water/Memory
I felt a deep connection to the O
man. He came to me like a gift, or life
preserver tossed at the right time when the waters seemed so deep. It wasn’t as if the waters were deep. It was more as if they held deep memories for
me. I felt separation separate from
me. I could understand his desire while
following mine. Also, I knew that to go
forward sometimes means to go away. When
I was little my mother taught me a few Yiddish phrases. One of them was, “Geh weg.” Go away.
A play curse, never said with annoyance or anger. It was a charming way to tell a child to go
away, like telling a fly to “Buzz off.”
Go away. When you go away you
find that your identity becomes stronger because you suddenly begin testing
your muscle against this element and that.
As you leave home you meet the world.
This is one of those conundrums that we all share. Every journey, you could say quite neatly, if
it’s a good journey, will bring you home again.
Deeper, stronger, different than before but with the same small kernel
of what is true about you.
I liked the O man. Always have, always will. I’ll admit that once I rediscovered him there
were times I wondered about him. Some
things that I might also wonder about myself.
Why does it take so long to go home?
Didn’t he know that so and so was waiting for him? After all the guts and the glory of Troy
hadn’t he had enough of wandering? These
questions remain. Some days they get answered.
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I hadn’t been unconnected to
myself. I had lived as the O man would,
giving life my fullest participation.
It’s only when you question everything that everything becomes a question. There is no certain path. I found that out when I looked back down the
road and there weren’t any telltale signs immediately available from this
backwards glance. Accepting that you are
where you are requires something of faithfulness. It isn’t that you’ve traveled this far and
didn’t get any place. That’s not what
matters. What matters is that you felt
life run through you, like blood. Like
water rushing. What matters is that you
listened to your story and when you stopped you had spent yourself
completely. That’s when you know it’s
the right story.
I knew that the O man’s story was a right
parallel for mine because of my deep and immediate response to it. I could calm down because I knew how his
story ended. The right story is the one
that tells itself through you. How do
you listen to it? Let me count the
waves. No, I really can’t say. Maybe you ride one and see if it takes you to
shore.
The O man was a sailor. I was a rider of waves. We had water in common. Water connects you to everything, maybe
everyone. We are not alone. As we weren’t really alone in the womb. We were connected through water. Our first memories might not be of this bond
but we literally swam in our first ocean before we knew what swimming was. I used to say, in my pride, that I loved the
ocean more than my mother. That was
before I understood that the ocean was the mother of us all and I felt as if I
could live forever within the contour of a wave.
The O man left home because he needed
to be surrounded by water. He was in his
element. Surrounded by it and at times,
even captivated by it. And there were
times, on his way home from Troy, when no winds, no how, would move his ship
upon the waters. His sails would stall
and his men exhausted by their efforts, could no longer row. Fate would snake them through an island. Death lurked round every corner and
occasionally snapped up one of them. For
that and other reasons, they left when the winds were with them. Besides, he was safer at sea, even in rough
waters, because water was his element.
At sea, even giant waves will pass under your ship like a string beneath
a kitten.
Jacques Cousteau spoke of the oceans
as the last great frontier. Explorers in
the last few decades have chosen many different fronts. Some have gone especially deeply into inner
space. Some have called the ocean depths
inner space as opposed to the space of black stellar night which we still seem
to find so foreign to us. It’s not so
much, I think, that there’s no soil to touch down upon as it is that there is
no sea to swim in. We have long been
connected to the water. If we crawled
from the sea, as some say, then we have not broken the umbilical cord. Our memories reside there. We go to the edge of the sea, except for
those inland dwellers that must go to the rivers, lakes and streams, to find
ourselves.
Some now say that water has the
ability, within its simple structure, to hold memories. Well, why not? Something in us responds so strongly, so
deeply, to the sea that this must be true.
We connect through water. It’s a
particularly funny, cosmic paradox that the cells which build us, bind us and
create unique individuals out of us all swim within an ocean of their own. We are not so much people as we are island
nations, archipelagos, oceanic stepping stones within the blue earth waters.
from Conversations with Nic, a journey to the land of
hope
also known as a
journey through the land of withdrawal.
Available through Kindle. Freda Karpf/Conversations with Nic
