Otium in Brighton

I went to Brighton to sing for my supper, and ended up serenading the sea! 

Not that one necessarily excludes the other, which brings to mind the complementary relationship between otium (cultured and constructive leisure), and negotium: business, active affairs, what we do for a living (from which we get 'negotiation'). Here is Wiki on the subject:

"Otium can be a temporary time of leisure, that is sporadic. It can have intellectual, virtuous or immoral implications. It originally had the idea of withdrawing from one's daily business (negotium) or affairs to engage in activities that were considered to be artistically valuable or enlightening (i.e. speaking, writing, philosophy). It had particular meaning to businessmen, diplomats, philosophers and poets."

Living to the full involves both, with an emphasis in retirement on otium negotiosum (busy leisure: pursuing a hobby and attending to one's own affairs). My objective on this occasion was to try and capture the shore buildings through the boisterous tunnel of a wave - and the waves were definitely up for it - but my shutter release proved too slow, and my camera turned spoil-sport and packed in, irreparably this time, it would seem.

Wave-play turned out to be a mere preliminary to the further pursuit of otium in the form of (sorry, no rhymes) discussion over dinner: business, diplomacy, philosophy, poetry and Orkney (odd that Wiki should have omitted the latter from its list). Ate Tapas, learned about Meet Ups, chatted to the delightful Monica from Madrid who has just graduated in Tourism and is out to make good in the world as photographer. Time to hand over to the next generation and splash back into the lap of leisure ;)

The Holms race, Stromness

The Basin, Stromness

Here's how it works: the swimmers pile into the Graemsay ferry in their swimsuits and hose themselves down with sea water. When level with the Holms, they jump off and swim back to cheering onlookers. 

It wasn't far to swim, the sea was warm, the reception even warmer,
the sun hotter than it's been all summer 

A great splash for my last day in Orkney!

'Mony a quirk'

Kirkwall from the Cathedral spire

I've been stone-skipping thoughts across the water, and managed to get a run of three that seemed to cover a good distance: Robert Rendall's "I' the Kirk Laft" (brought to mind by a visit to the upper regions of St Magnus cathedral with Laura and Anton, under the excellent guidance of Ross Flett); Norman MacCaig's "Also" (because an anniversary always dovetails love with hurt), and, as a much weaker final skip, "Parsing my dead daughter".

I' the Kirk Laft
Here i' the sooth laft's neuks sae dim,

Twa aald-time relics - Haad thee wits!

A hangman's ladder twa could clim',

A widden pulpit, geen tae bits.

Whaur ither should they than in kirk

O' guid and evil mind us a'.

Time plays, hooever, mony a quirk:

Prelate and tief are baith awa.


Also
You try to help, and what happens?
You hurt also.

You hoist a sail on a boat
and one day, gusted sideways,
the boat is scattered in timbers
round a slavering rock.
You put violets in water, and what happens?
They lose all their scent.

And you give absence and loneliness and fear
when you give love - that full sail,
that sweet water.


Parsing my dead daughter
In dreams, you're never dead, or even centre-
stage - we're just together, muddling along
as usual, like last night when the revolver
had to be hidden in your gym bag among
an assortment of soft toys, yes, our lives 
depended on it (I'd been reading Primo Levi's
If Not Now, When), and your being there alive
never came into it. How many cuddlies
we could take and still reach the further shore
was the issue until, that is, the whole thing
suddenly seemd odd - the dream's normality - 
and then, just before reaching full lucidity,
I told myself sharply: throw the gun into the wings
along with the dead and hold onto my daughter.

I've always loved the way in which Rendall manages to collapse the whole great edifice of our value-system with the seemingly throwaway phrase 'mony a quirk'. Contingency comes into MacCaig's poem too, yet much as I love "Also", for a long while I thought the last line, 'that sweet water', was a bit far-fetched: the scent of cut violets does not drain into the water they're placed in, surely? But this last fortnight of swimming and musing about water, especially in the countdown to Adelina's anniversary, has led me to understand that I was being too literal minded. The water is not necessarily sweet with flower fragrance, but because it sustains them (however briefly), and us. And what sustains us most sweetly, is what we choose to draw from our experiences, hence my reparsing. Hence my swimming too.

The Harray hand!

A dull day infinitely lightened up by what I found for lunch!

 The drowning-not-waving sequence was also absorbing, if hard on the legs:

Tomorrow, 27 July, is the 8th anniversary of my daughter Adelina's death by drowning.

Touch and texture (an aside)

Something has been troubling me about the mismatch between water seen and water sensed - through the skin, that is. I cannot think of any other area of experience where a similar lack of correspondence exists between the senses. Certainly, we can see water and think it looks cold, clear and deep, but when we say it is 'smooth', 'rough' or 'choppy', these concepts do not translate into their tactile equivalents.

We are so readily inclined towards metaphors and seeing similarity in dissimilars, that it is unusual to find a lacuna of this kind. This is perhaps especially odd in our age of synasesthesia, where the emphasis is on the 'union of senses'. I myself am inclined to explain my love of sentence structure and prosody in kinetic terms: I feel, when I speak or write in English, that I am navigating the contours of possible clauses much as a dolphin might navigate by means of echo-location, or a fish by means of its lateral line. In other languages I plod through sand stumbling from one cliché to another as if they were oases. Fanciful? perhaps - but that's the point. This kind of mapping between kinesthesia (sense-perception) and syntax seems pretty far-fetched yet comes naturally enough, whereas I can't seem to bridge the mismatch between what water looks like and what it feels like.

The following photos, textured though they are, only trigger metaphorical associations, not literal ones. Conversely, swimming in any of the waters depicted here would never translate into seeing these images. And this even holds for the Fuji-shots taken in the water, which should recapture both the sight and the moment as I experienced it. Can anyone wade in and explain this to me?

Marwick Head

Rackwick, Hoy

Swannay

Swannay Loch

I have replaced my wet-&-wasted Ixus with a supposedly water-proof Fuji bought online, only to have it take on water within a few shots. No Doubilet doublets for me, and if you haven't yet had a look at what to my mind is the most lyrical of all photographs, then here it is (click on 14 to see the Papuan fisherman and baitfish). 

So I managed to lose another camera, the sun, and my swim-cap all in a day, and if it hadn't been for  the thick layer of weed-hair which coated the stones in the many shallow bits round the island, I would no doubt have lost by knee-caps too.

Nothing for it but to retrieve a 'Hamlet moment' from a previous outing to Swannay and enjoy its soothing symmetry.

Rackwick, Hoy

Rackwick on a moody day of sun and mists. If hubris is 'pride before a fall', then what is the word for caution after one? I have the choice between a swim and a photo-shoot, and opt for the permanence of pictures - cowardly? But cowards can win the day too, as do the protagonists in Robert Rendall's "experiment in scaldic metre" entitled Shore Tullye (tully being a big knife for slicing meat or fish):

    Crofters few but crafty,

    Krugglan doun b' moonlight,

    Hidan near the headland,

    Hint great congles waited.

    Swiftly rude sea-raiders

    Stranded, evil handed:

    Scythe blades soon were bleedan,

    Skulls crackt in the tullye.

    Stretched the battle beachward;

    Bravely back we drave them.

    Een fleep fleean hinmost

    Fand we maakan landward:

    Him apae the hillside

    Hewed we doun in feud fight -

    Never kam sea-rovers

    Seekan back to Rackwick.

I love the irony of such a lofty form being used to depict crofters who, cowering behind rocks, manage to isolate (or chance upon!) one of the enemy and kill him like a lost sheep only to boast about their prowess and gloat at the fact that they have forever freed Rackwick of intruders! 

The boulders on a sunnier day 

The 'Bothy', a typical croft

The Castle of Yesnaby

The Castle of Yesnaby, a sea stack between the cliffs of Yesnaby and the Bay of Skaill

I dropped my handy Canon Ixus in the sea after taking the shot below - I survived the dunk, it didn't. I'll let the photos speak for themselves while I contend with my sulk.

Orkney Polar Bears

Orkney Polar Bears at Evie Pier

A very warm welcome from the Orkney PBs and a refreshingly chilly sea! Children of a mirror-writing age and a happy granny on the beach, no jellyfish anywhere within sight. And to cap it all, a long chat about the Nordic Studies Centre of the UHI with one of the lecturers (also a novelist).

The distinction between water-lovers and land-huggers reminds me  of Bruce Chatwin's division of the world into sedentary and nomadic people, with his own bias for journeys: “Man's real home is not a house, but the Road, and that life itself is a journey to be walked on foot.” (What am I Doing Here).

The 'on foot' can be quibbled with, as the existence of Sea Gypsies attests to (worth following the links to each of the socio-linguistic groups in this hub). For an audio slideshow with excellent photos see James Morgan's documentary 'Sea Nomads' on the Bajau-Laut. The National Geographic has an interesting article on the Moken, and here is a BBC photo-essay about them). Should the plight of the Sea Gypsies make you despondent about the state of endangered life-styles, here's an antidote:

"The Moken are born, live, and die on their boats, and the umbilical cords of their children plunge into the sea," we are told. This reminds me of the exchange between the Comte d'Orsay and Disraeli: "I was born French, have lived French, and shall die French!"
"Have you no ambition man?"

Skaill & Marwick

Bay of Skaill

Sunshine and jellyfish, ease and danger! I swam along the shore dodging the occasional jellyfish, till I came across a raft of them and gave up.

I tried Marwick bay where the incoming tide created perfect body-surfing waves, only to find myself planing over more jellyfish, with no control over speed and direction. So I lay on a warm slab of slate, wondering about water.

The word 'baptism' comes from the Greek for 'dip, plunge, immerse', and it's no coincidence that full-body immersion should have been used in order to ritualise cleansing and spiritual rebirth. Even a casual dip makes one feel renewed, jellyfish notwithstanding.

Norman MacCaig captures the feeling in his poem Praise of a Boat.
    Boat of no dreams, you open spaces
    The mind can't think of till it's in them.
    Where the works is easy and dangerous and
    Who can distinguish saints and sinners?

Replace the word 'boat' with 'dip' and you have it, the sense of awed (self) discovery, liminality and  levelling humility!

Marwick Bay