Tuesday, June 22, 2021

water/memory

 


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

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