The Sea Around Us

One of the world’s greatest writers, by some beautiful fortune, chose the sea as her subject. In her acceptance speech, when she won the National Book Award in 1952 for The Sea Around Us, she said:

The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities. If they are not there, science cannot create them. If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry…
 
The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.”

Today, I got to kneel in loosely blown sand on the oceanfloor and write. I knelt in front of a Pink Smith Damselfish: a dive slate on my wrist, a flounder beside my knee, wet book and stubby pencil in my hand. One of the things I hadn't thought about before learning to dive was holding hands. Sometimes I feel we adults can talk a little too much with an empty space between us and no connection or understanding. The dives have been mute, and yet so full of dialogue, there's been so much laughter under the water, reassurance, affirmations, touch, eye contact that felt more like conversations, physical slapstick, support, and most of all, us all holding onto each other and not letting anyone twist off course, be lifted by the current, or float up too far. It was my friend's turn to be the balloon today and I the kiteflyer, whose hand reached up and caught hers. The level of contact is the kind you give and get when nursing and caring for someone. I felt held all day: by the water and one another.

Whenever I write poetry in the sea, I think of Rachel Carson. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau, she thought of the prose she wrote as poetry, and was called the scientist-poet of the sea. Because we know land better than water, she is more well respected for Silent Spring, her final book, but it is her sea trilogy that I’ve taken into my heart and think is her most evocative writing: The Sea Around Us, The Edge of the Sea and Under the Sea-Wind. She once told a friend that after her death, she wanted to be re-incarnated as a tern.

To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and the flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.”
                                                                                                                                                  Under the Sea-Wind

In her life, she only got to dive once. From her writing, you would think she could only exist underwater. She made the quiet sea crackle for me when I read about and listened to the seafloor through archive recordings that she'd described - which had just been captured in the 1940s. I think often of how much the oceans need her hope and sense of wonder now, her voice.