WONDERWRITINGS
Issue 1.3        Summer 2005
 

Ocean
Eric Silverman

 Rather than surmise infinitude, Walt Whitman said, better to see the world’s charm, up close, a distance from an oceanic source. An urban waterfront, flood tidal estuary, the glow of chimneys in Brooklyn, the shore air of New Jersey February in a coach from Camden under blanket, a chowder pot of little necks in summer.

I imagine Whitman saw himself as no match for the Pacific Ocean, and neither are we. Having been around the Atlantic most of his life, for Whitman, poeticizing the Pacific would be like making nature at its inspiring and terrifying suitable for framing. Coming to the Pacific for the first time, the mind has no reference, confronted with a supernal expanse.

Once the Atlantic was a chime, a psalm I heard as a child. After all, the people of Atlantis were godlike, more human than humans. I grew up near New York City, along the beaches, an amazed creature in the under-curves of waves. A metal pail and shovel became my sextant.

"Shambhala Wave" Cheryl Alexander
Copyright 2005 Cheryl Alexander
www.CherylAlexanderCreations.com

My earliest blur of recollection is the beach: Waves, light, and sand. The Atlantic created myths, sailors and orphaned immigrants who talked of the great crossing. They brought their civilizations. My great-great-grandfather Leopold Spitzer escaped poverty and took sail in 1866 from Bremen, Germany. Like Europeans before and after, he proclaimed the new, then, reached back and wrenched free the umbilical cord from the Old. But, most who survived the journey were haunted by the past or  preserved it, when needed.

Seeing the Pacific beneath the town of Daly City, built on the San Andreas Fault in California during the height of suburban absurdity, mid-20th century, we witness a force explode about the black, volcanic sea stack rising out of the water. I used to take the continent for granted; I pictured it, while taking my sweet time, going by under my wheels, an endless highway.

Instead of concluding in El Dorado, the continent becomes a precipice hundreds of feet, a vertical freefall into thin air.  Here and there, the land stops, as Henry Miller put it, "About fifty feet from the house, the land simply ended, and it was an abrupt descent to the sea far below."

It is this ending and endlessness in close quarters that vexed many great writers.  Whitman’s lifeline with the Atlantic made reference as much to the “senseless, such an entire absence of art, books, talk… elegance -- so indescribably comforting, even this winter day – grim, yet so delicate-looking, so spiritual -- striking emotional…depths, subtler than all the poems, paintings music, I have ever read, seen, heard.”  Something about the Pacific goes beyond prose, to reverence. To revere such immensity of scale, our tongues go still, and we have found our place, or we are helpless, like the societies before the tsunami and tempest along the Pacific rim, or, the yards of houses that fall down along tectonic faults, lines of debris etched in human scale. 

There is the weight of vertigo and sunlight from the cobalt sky on this brilliant, cloudless day, as if the world was new. No name to this place, no pipe, no lyre, only a link to the primordial past.  I remember, when I can, the children and wife I had breakfast with before driving to a solitary spot on the California coast called the land. An echoing from the breakers can be heard as it meanders up cliffs and beyond the coastal meadow.

It is a terrible roar. It announces itself, repeating, over and over. It is an origin, of sound, before time, before a place to call itself a thing. This is El Ohim, voice of God.
 

Copyright 2005 by Eric Silverman. All rights reserved.

Eric J. Silverman is a writer living in California.
He is working on a book of observations
titled Shore Dominions.