Chapter 3
A violin is a living thing, make no mistake. Pull it out of its case. Tune its strings, plucking with the corner of a thumbnail, twisting its carved wooden pegs. Tension comes to its strings, through the bridge, and across the back. Rosin the bow. Horsehair strands brought taught with a half-turn of a knurled knob. The bow’s balance felt in the slightest flick of the fingers embracing its base.
Bringing the instrument up to the chin, a tentative light stroke introduces the bow to the strings. One at a time, fingers find their fret-less places on the infinity of a blank, smooth neck.
A sound rises, vague, indistinct. It’s not just that the hand must rediscover its deeply ingrained rigors. Reward of all those years of practice. The violin itself needs to awaken, to warm to the vibrations coursing through it, to develop the particular dynamic resonance its woods and its maker’s ingenuity have provided.
This first transition takes but a few moments. Tone gathers itself and deepens and broadens. It begins to fill the space, whether a cozy room or a concert hall.
The instrument, once engaged, presents the listener with a building nuance and power. Its potential emerges subtly, slowly, until finally, as player and instrument; their vibrations from brain-waves to the way its particular varnish coating affects the resonance beginning deep within its wood’s cells; reaches air, joining together to speak with an articulation, an eloquence…. Immediate in both definitions: instantaneous and direct.
It’s only as the final echoes die away and we are left with strands of fading memory; of tone, of inflection, of rhythm and melody, and mass and punctuation; that we pause to consider the miracle that has just occurred.
Way before my earliest memory lie vestiges of traces of sunlight dazzling upon open water. The rush of wind. The murmur and roar of broken water, ceaseless waves, motion without end. Always experienced from shore looking out. And so it continued, for most of my life, most of the time.
An appetite for gazing out across a broad horizon. The earth’s curvature receding beneath a thickening wedge looking through a thin atmosphere trending from deep blue above to nearly white at horizon’s rim, resulting from its load of salt and moisture. Distant clouds silhouetted or blending into a haze insinuating a far shore thousands of leagues to the East.
Leagues, not miles. No cadence of marching feet could ever measure this distance. No number of mile mile paces. Leagues are the only way to measure an expanse we can only traverse buoyantly; carried, transported, transformed by a passage experienced as the earth itself revolving beneath our keel.
This horizon always beckoned with a strange appeal. Unlike most objects of desire it held no images of joys, pleasures, transports. No promises of satisfaction, satiation, or the intoxication of a collapse into a surfeit of attainment. No, its promise was silent, empty, without form. A gaze into space. Not space visible, like looking up into a dark night sky and falling into a vastness spread out above. This space, bending beyond sight in an implication of prolonged distance poised over unfathomable depths. A strange promise.
Endless. I suppose for the very fact of its formlessness. Where else but in that awkward peering we make into the void from out of which creation arises have we experienced such a quality of promise as to defy any sense of surfeit.
I have never had enough of this. Over the years my forays out onto this – what else to call it but a surface? – Have always been short. Long enough to taste the difference, the immediate and profound difference we cannot ignore once afloat. No longer anchored to the illusion of solid ground.
It has only been these last few years that have brought me to this – I cannot call it comfort or familiarity – but this accommodation to a life truly spent upon the sea.
Why is it that even in the contemplation of a lover’s eyes it is this quality of light; a golden glow perceived through a transparent green; it is the ocean I have longed for? Why is it that in a warm embrace with beloved flesh, intelligence shining forth from glistening orbs that capture and hold light; it is the fecundity of ice cold seas that beckons? A reverse of the old poetic trope. A lover’s eye standing in for the ocean’s ungraspable being and not the other way around.
The taste of blood, or sweat, or tears; salty, not like the ocean, but as an ocean, transported to this place. A sign that the sea can never be left behind so long as its essence courses through our veins.
I’ve been struck by the fact that on this earth, impermanent; it is only the surface of the sea in all its constant malleability that presents us with the longest lasting sight available to us. Its surface meeting air and crashing against sand or rock. The only consistency this earth has known for the billions of years since the seas first filled their basins. No other sight is this old upon the surface of this earth. Only celestial bodies, in their untouchable removal from our presence, can vie with it in age. But this sea, we touch it. We are calmed, or wracked, by its motion. We are…
The sea is not “like a life blood.” It is the lifeblood of this earth. Its movements, its containment, its interactions – internal and external – have been beating at the heart of earth; an incubator for what we consider life; but also life’s precursor. In its dynamism and flow it provided the template, the original melody copied, transformed, replicated, and mutated into every form life now occupies, or ever could.
Gorgeous painting.