oceans part III - distance and negative capability

That High Victorian  poet of doubt and loneliness Matthew Arnold might seem increasingly remote to some modern sensibilities, but he can still chuck out a line to stop you in your tracks. (Arnold's capitals and italics, btw.)

 "YES! in the sea of life enisl’d,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone.
The islands feel the enclasping flow,
And then their endless bounds they know."


We're back where we live now, a long way from where we've been. 

From this:

to this:

It's good to settle back, readjust the colour palette, season and time of day, re-engage with family and good friends in the UK.

But we are geographically separated from some people we wish we were a lot closer to; there are "echoing straits between us thrown."

The pain of geograhical separation is mediated by electronic non-distance. Thanks to Saint Berners-Lee we can talk and see over vast expanses of space and time. You can't throw your arms round a Skype or FaceTime screen, but they sure help. Passenger aircraft fly at not much below the speed of sound. Those we love are - in theory - only a day away.

 Keats wrote in a letter of the importance of what he called "Negative Capability: that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."


The map on the seat-back set in front of me showed something schematic, unreal:

In this huge aluminium tube, am I really where the little white plane says I am? Are those I want closer to me really so far away? What is geography to the workings of the heart?


I'm finding big paradoxes here. 

There is only one ocean, whether it's brilliant azure or delicate blue-greys. 

Meditation can create a sense of oneness, unity with both the azure and the blue-grey, with them there and us here. 

We can agree with Keats, and say further that living with paradox is an essential part of freedom, of living in the now not in the land of "back then" or "ooo er, whatever next.."

Yet there still lies between us "the unplumbed, salt, estranging sea."

The internet cannot entirely gainsay the Indian Ocean.

One Ocean

This is an oceanic coast, a continental coast. Nothing much between here and South Africa. Our more constrained and limited British seas can also cut up rough and nasty. So is it imagination, and/or knowledge, that makes the difference? Because this feels nothing like the seacoasts at home. Perhaps it’s an endlessly variable combination of light, colour, sound that I pick up in each case, or maybe it's just because I know the fact of difference. Either way, it feels very different from “home.”

Yet there is really only one ocean. On the whole planet, apart from inland seas (aka vast lakes) all oceans and seas are joined, are one. And the old mind-trick of turning a good-quality globe so that Australia is bottom left and you are looking at the Pacific reminds us that mostly, the planet is oceans and seas.

We often allocate human moods to the ocean, as we do to God/gods. They can be merciful, wrathful, gentle meek and mild. The ocean we can call angry, gentle, and so on. It’s not, of course. It is only and purely -  the ocean. 

Each wave is a fast-moving, continually changing, unique phenomenon, dying right in front of me and being drawn back and resumed.

The ocean is merely and entirely doing what it has done, with endless variations, for millions upon millions of years, before there were any people of any sort to watch it. Do I create each wave in front of me every time I look at it? 

 Are today’s waves two or three metres high? Hey, this next one must be 3.5 metres...That’s not what yields insight, though it might help me keep my trousers dry. 
 
Maybe I can just be with it, leaving aside analysis and measurement.

And yet, if you just contemplate for a moment the impossibly complex set of dynamic systems - tide; winds here and hundreds of miles out to sea; currents; salinity and other chemistry; air and water temperature; gravity, phases of the moon - the self-sustaining systems that create this particular breaking wave, which resembles the one before it and the one after it but is unique. 

If I add that to what I can see and here in front of me, I can feel a sense of awe (in the old and strong sense), presentmomentness,  wholeness, identity with the planet and its workings that I’m happy to call sacred, provided you don't start lugging in meanings still adhering to a Rock of Ages,  Cleft for Me, etc. (Well, you can if you wish, it's up to you, but that's not what I'm trying to get at here.)

For me, anthropomorphic deities don’t work, and the ocean is not wrathful. It is other than me, indifferent, total. Powerful beyond imagining, yes. Impossibly complex and beautiful, yes, with a beauty that goes much deeper than pretty or scenic. It’s in the curve of the wave as is crumples and blues into white that I find a sacred wholeness to sit with for a while.

 

Hull down

The title is not a snide shot at the current European City of Culture...

There was a time when English was full of metaphors and sayings from sailing the sea. "Three sheets in the wind," or " "half seas over," for "drunk." "The devil to pay," (lengthy one to explain, do look it up if you're interested) "not enough room to swing a cat," (ditto) and so on.

During the late eighteenth century, the Royal Navy was the largest single industrial enterprise in the world, and a huge proportion of the male population were or had been sailors. Not so nowadays, despite every available creek on the South Coast being jammed with boats (many of which are little-used.) So I guess we can expect the sailing references to gradually fall out of use - to be replaced perhaps by the delights of internet terminology...

One that may be dropping out of awareness and use is "hull down." If you look at the horizon in this (poor quality, sorry!) photo, about a third of the way across from the left, you'll see a white dot. That's the superstructure of a ship "hull down." In other words, the curvature of the earth is hiding the hull from us and only the superstructure is poking above the horizon.

With sailing ships the masts of which could be 140 feet high, this would have been a more easily-visible phenomenon.

In the ancient world, it was generally assumed that the earth was flat, because it appeared so. Pythagoras, then Aristotle, worked out that it wasn't, but news would have spread slowly. By medival times in Europe, it seems that people generally grasped the idea that the planet was not flat. Some historians think that despite the sophistications and splendours of Chinese civilization, it was the 16th or 17 centuries before they wised up.

Sailors and coast watchers could have told them about the curvarture of the earth as soon as boats were large enough to sail over the horizon on a clear day. Logically, if the atmosphere is clear enough to see the masts and sails, why can't I see the hull? Because the earth is curved. If it's curved, why doesn't all the water pour off it? Aha. It must be curved all the way round, i.e. a sphere.

Which is a long-winded way of wondering when it is wise to entirely trust our senses, i.e. an empirical attitude, and when we need more abstract thought, i.e. a burst of reasoning.

Or, as in the example of hull-down sailing ships, both.

 This huge freighter, heading off across the Indian Ocean on a long voyage, isn't hull down, but it soon will be. And at least I got the horizon more or less level in this photo.

Perhaps when I was taking the first shot I was slightly unnerved by a sign painted on the path under my feet:

Indeed they do. A local woman, 75 years of age, was walking this path a couple of years ago and was unfortunate enough to be bitten by a dugite. ("Doogite," for fellow poms.) Her big mistake was to think that since she didn't feel too bad, she'd get home and phone from there. The official advice is immobility and summoning help quickly, since the dugite is "potentially" lethal. When she got home, she said "I think I've made a big mistake." Horrifyingly, one of the symptoms of dugite venom is said to be a feeling of impending doom. In her case, tragically, the feeling was an accurate portent. The medics couldn't save her.

Not all Australian snakes are lethal, of course, but if I see one, I'm pretty soon hull down, from the snake's point of view.

distant events, immediate screens, a middle way

Geographical distance can create a sense of increased objectivity, give rise to new or at least different perspectives. 

Electronic distance doesn't exist, unless we create it.

In the wonderful clarity of a West Australian sunlit morning, the trees and shrubs are differently beautiful from the ones at home, the birds energetically and raucously so.

And yet elsewhere two nation's leader seem to want to destroy each other's nation (we have to hope it is only"seem") and within one of those nations, a deranged individual recently slaughtered many young people of whom he knew nothing, with whom, as individuals, he had no identifiable grievance.

What am I to make of this? What is the Middle Way between unproductive distress and callous disregard? Why do I keep turning on the screens to find out more about both horrors? I am thousands of miles from both situations.

I find help in an article in a major Australian newspaper, written by DBC Pierre. Most apparently motiveless attackes, like many or most terrorists attacks on civilians, end in the suicide of the perpetrator. He quotes research* that finds that following suicides car crash fatalities increase, specifically in areas where the suicide was well-publicised. Murder-suicides were followed by rises in multi-person crashes. So under the cliché "copy-cat killing" lies something more significant; we seem to be wired to find others like ourselves, and do what they do. Brain chemistry may have a bearing here.

Pierre writes "I have a sneaking sense that by consuming all the outrage, letting the buzz of fear, wallpaper our lives, we're becoming complicit. A sense that our voracious focus on far-flung outrage is now unwittingly part of the cause."   

He goes on "the screen craze has become 24/7, in our hands, on our desks, our walls, and if the stated aim of much of it is to put us at the scene, take us live, I simply ask: do we need to go? All the time? I'm living right here where I stand. This is my sphere of physical influence and I should lose myself instead into some place where I'm fearful and powerless?"

Pierre reminds us that we contain powerful chemicals such as dopamine and cortisol. His proposition is that the feelings aroused by heavy screen involvement in terrible events we are powerless to influence may create some of the same states of mind that result in such horrors to begin with. In other words, and not necessarily in any rational or willed sense, we may, if we are prone to depression, alienation, fear and the helpless anger that comes from frustration, be nudged towards similar acts. That seems to me a bold assertion that it is worth considering seriously.

"I wonder if, by being swept through screens into constant turmoil, we are priming ourselves with the chemistry of those who cause it, as well as promoting the market for worse."

Some of the stuff that comes through screens we can do something about- at elections, for example, or when something awful happens in our locality, by direct action as happened following the Grenfell Tower fire. But much of it is geographically beyond us, beyond any likelihood of positive action. The result is surely bad for us as individuals. Nothing that is of much use comes from such psychic disturbance.

Pierre's final point is about the paradox that whilst we are drawn into distance events we are powerless to effect through screens, we are at the same time distanced from the events- hence the frustration, hence the fatigue, the possibility of callous disegard. 

Screens - just look at the virulent hatred to be found on Twitter - help us to create the Other that must be hated and destroyed. It's easier to create the despised Other when you don't have to look them in the eye, speak with them.

So a leading politician receives foul abuse daily; so a leading TV political correspondent has to have professional protection.

I don't think there's any point in being anti-screen; after all, what am I doing at present but trying to reach out to a few readers via a screen? The idea that the world is getting steadily worse is surely as useless a proposition as the idea is is that it is getting steadily better, since so much depends on what you are measuring and where you're measuring it. It seems unlikely to me that heavy screen use about current events makes many of us feel the world is getting better...

I hope I'm not just being squeamish when I say I don't want relentless updates on mass murder. I may want to know the simple fact of it. But if as a result of closely following this horror, I really feel that the world is getting more and more horrible, then I'm doing two things.

Firstly, I am ignoring history and much information about the contemporary world, so that I am out of balance. My view is inaccurate, yet I am relying on it. I am a victim of confirmation bias, the tendency to "search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions."

Secondly, I've lost the middle way. That is, the way that asks useful questions such as:

• How much do I need to know about this? 
• What if anything can I do about it? 
• How significant is it in the local, national, world view of human life and its possibilities? 
• In what ways should I care, in what ways should my compassion be engaged rather than my fear and hatred?

It is easy to be continuously outraged, enraged, depressed about the world we live in. It is harder to be grounded enough in the realities of this moment in this world to bring about positive change.


I'm going to turn off all screens for a bit now and get a little gentle morning sunlight into my soul.

*Influence: the psychology of persuasion, byRobert B Cialdini

waiting with the pain, finding the insights

There is no controlling life.

Try corralling a lightning bolt,

containing a tornado. Dam a

stream and it will create a new

channel. Resist, and the tide

will sweep you off your feet.

Allow, and grace will carry

you to higher ground. The only

safety lies in letting it all in –

the wild and the weak; fear,

fantasies, failures and success.

When loss rips off the doors of

the heart, or sadness veils your

vision with despair, practice

becomes simply bearing the truth.

In the choice to let go of your

known way of being, the whole

world is revealed to your new eyes.

                             Danna Faulds 

 

I know that sometimes things are so bad that no matter what practices we do or what medications we take, we can't seem to generate even that small amount of faith we need for inspiration to keep going. Then, if we can stand inside our pain awhile and wait, over time we may come to also see it as a way into the deepest parts of ourselves and then back out into the world, a vehicle for new insight into who we are and how much we need to care for ourselves and one another. If there is nothing we can do right now but wait then, as TS Eliot wrote, "the faith is in the waiting." If we can but wait, we may yet emerge from despair with the same understanding that Zen master Suzuki Roshi expressed: "Sometimes, just to be alive is enough."

                                                          Sharon Salzburg, "Faith."

 

Well I don't think the first passage is great poetry, and the second might not strike one as elegant prose - but enough already with the lit crit. I hope you agree that these are tough and valuable insights. Distracting ourselves from painful feelings short-circuits any authentic acceptance of who we are and where we are. Accepting the reality of painful feelings, and the limitations of what we can really do about them, isn't the same thing as giving up, giving in to things we should resist.

 

And we can also take the pain-killers if we need to.

Happy feet, sunlight and shadows

A post-meditation discussion on the dancing patterns made by sunlight, wind and birch leaves - the wondrous complexity of all the natural forces and transactions that made these transient patterns. But then we are in and of transient patterns - it's just good to recognise that in something serendipitously beautiful. And it seems to have made someone's feet happy, too!

 

What does the water say, then?

Nothing, of course - says rational thought. Water has no speech organs, no human agency, and therefore since speech is a human phenomenon, then...(yawn...excuse me while I switch him off.)

But Mr Logical Bore is actually, in his own terms, correct.

To pretend the water says anything to me (or anyone) is, I guess, one of those rhetorical tricks we use to try to express the inexpressible - a state of mind, a state of being.

When I refer to what the water says, I'm trying to note down the effect water, in a few of its multudinous states, has on me and I'm sure on millions of us. I'm not seeking to project onto the water something of me. The traffic is the other way. Whether it's the churning wake of a cross-channel ferry:

the power of a breaking wave:

 or the unexpected peace of an inland waterway amid the noise, the crowds and excitement of a large music festival:

 water will always work, if I can let it.

Much of us is water. It runs through us. Many (most?) people like to sit and gaze out over the sea, or a lake, or just a river or a pond.  There's surely something going on at a profound level. After all, we may love the view out across green fields, but it doesn't have the same pull, does it? Herman Melville writes that if it was sand pouring over Niagra Falls, we wouldn't flock there. (A disturbingly strange thought!)

Here's a bit from the start of "Moby Dick."
 
"Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries- stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. . . Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever."

Everyone may know it, but I hadn't consciously realised it, until it grew on me, slowly and fruitfully. I now know that provided I don't try too hard - or preferably, not at all - and let my awareness rest with the water, its movement, its stillness, whatever changing form it takes in front of me, I am rewarded by some moments of being in the present. A sense of unity and universal presence. 

That is what the water says.

Archhippy/folkies The Incredible String Band had a Water Song:

Water water see the water flow
Glancing dancing see the water flow
Oh wizard of changes water water water
Dark or silvery mother of life
Water water holy mystery heavens daughter

God made a song when the world was new
Waters laughter sings it is true
Oh, wizard of changes, teach me the lesson of flowing

     (secularists may prefer to take God and holy as metaphors, if it helps.)

We change, all the time, as everything does. Nothing is constant. It's change that enables us to be. Perhaps the water holds me because from it I absorb the lesson of flowing, the lesson of being here and now changing in the non-existent present moment.