The Calling of the Sea: The Sea, Art and Freedom.
This time. A few words on the sea. Art, the written word, song, and so much more it influences and represents for many.
Lately I have been attempting to go sea swimming again, anxiety about government approved sewage disposal into our precious seas and along our coastlines is of course enough to put anyone off. While the worst UK government in history, into its 14th year, continues to destroy our country, environment, economy, our health service, our rights, and more – there are still opportunities to be seized.
One simple ancient right is to swim. Swimming currently relies on the use of apps delivering updates from local swimmers and surfers. Essential in the face of the recent lack of proactive and consistent monitoring from the UK’s Environmental Agency. While not respected and protected by government at this time, the sea relies on members of the public to monitor it and protect our access to it and our safety within it; from RNLI lifeboat volunteers to fellow swimmers looking out for pipes chucking out raw sewage into our coastal waters from Tyneside to Exmouth.
Holiday season is upon us. The masses are flocking. The tradition of paid time off from work, holidays by the seaside, was originally a hard-fought right – I’ll come to that later. The sea is a representation of freedom. I was finally able to immerse myself in the English Channel this morning. For the first time in a year. I swam just off the coast of Brighton and Hove. It was life affirming, liberating, and refreshing. The sea certainly has its charm.
I’ve always been drawn to the sea. There is something freeing about its company. Its rhythm calming and soothing, yet it can be a wild and unruly being, at times destructive. As with life, the sea offers a colourful palate of moods and flow, untamed, interchangeable. The power of nature. The sea can of course be hugely therapeutic. Perhaps that’s why so many of us are drawn toward it, whether by laying on beaches or walking along its pebble shores.
It is where the horizon is often undefined. The expanse beyond. There is a sense of freedom and phenomenal space when the sea is in view.
Dazzling reflections of sunlight dancing wildly across the deep blue on a summer’s day. Thick darkening shades whipped up on the waves of stormy winter afternoons. The fresh sea salty breeze. Refreshing. Pleasant and welcoming. Every day, the sea a different colour. Rich navy blue, light azure, greens, browns, sometimes milky white on the horizon. The sea has a different mood about it each day. Wild and free, sometimes calmer. The seagulls circle, squawking, diving on cartons of chips on the seafront paving of seaside towns. I notice the shifting seasonal changes, the rhythm of coastal life.
We all descend from the sea of course, and there perhaps lays its most ancient calling to many. Beach crowds gather; beer cans, sunburn, and Mr Whippy’s 99’s with a flake, to the heavy influence and draw of the sea on writers, artists, and musicians.
Shakespeare mention’s the ocean two hundred times across his works, the sea most notably in The Tempest, where the sea seems to reflect the obsidian mirror of the character Prospero, reminiscent of Elizabethan occultist John Dee. In Herman Merville’s Moby Dick, Ahab’s obsession of vengeance with the great whale, leads to his own downfall at sea. Gangsters by the sea in Graham Green’s Brighton Rock, Pinkie falling from the pier. Death In Venice by Thomas Mann set amongst the vista of the coastal resort setting built on ancient marshy lagoons. The northeast England retreat in Benjamin Myers’ The Offing, near Robin Hood’s Bay, where a young working class man’s world is opened in the presence of a older bohemian woman. Nearby, some years earlier, Dracula lands at Whitby arriving by sea on the Demeter in Bram Stoker’s novel of multiple great and less than great film adaptations. The Salt Path by Raynor Winn from Cornwall to Dorset, a journey from despair through the healing power of nature to a life affirming rebuilding of lives and spirits. Set across the world’s mighty oceans, Horatio Clare’s Down To The Sea In Ships explores the lives of container ship crews making epic journeys and the human stories within these challenging environments. The memorable childhood film portrayals of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island remain in distant memory. The sea features as a leading character in some of the most highly praised writing of the 20th century. Ernest Hemingway’s last major work, The Old Man and the Sea, won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Nobel Prize for Literature, a story of the aging but experienced fisherman Santiago on the straits of Florida. Challenged by the sea and his will to overcome eighty-four days without a catch. The sea often represents struggle and the will to over come it.
Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the albatross and tragedy. Emily Dickinson’s I Started Early – Took my Dog, an awakening, having been taken by the tide. The masterful Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas, set in the seaside village of Llareggub, Wales. It’s reading by Richard Burton highly recommended. Collectively, there are many examples to be taken from the poets.
From the rhythm of poetry to music, John Glover-Kind’s Oh I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside made famous by music hall singer Mark Sheridan, summed up the emerging trend of British seaside holidays’; of sand castles, Punch and Judy shows, sticks of rock and candy floss. From the sea, themes aplenty emerge, Robert Smith’s Pirate Ships, with its accordion and nocturnal dreamscape to The Beach Boy’s cheer of Surfin’ USA to Otis Redding’s (Sittin’ On) the Dock Of The Bay. There is of course much to explore, and in a broad sense, from traditional sailor sea shanties to metal band Mastodon’s Leviathan concept album based on Merville’s Moby Dick novel. The sea draws many an artist in within its themes. From ocean waves to sound waves. David Toop’s Ocean of Sound is a book that explores a story from when Debussy first heard Javanese music performed in 1889, to the development of ambient sound, to Jimi Hendrix and beyond.
Of course, for painters from Peder Balke to Joseph Turner, the sea was an obsession. L.S Lowry’s painting, July, The Seaside (1942), celebrated the new phenomenon of holidays by the sea for most. The scene of a crowded beach of clothed people taking in the sea air. A time before bikinis and trunks. A new phenomenon, because from the industrial age, as capitalism kicked in, and city skylines became full of mucky fog, the streets and buildings plastered in soot, the draw of a few days reprieve from factory life by the seaside, although fashionable and achievable for the more privileged of Victorians, holidays did not become a reality for the British working classes until the Holidays with Pay Act of 1938 - with the often overlooked fact that British working class men had only gained the vote in 1918, and working class women in 1928. As the working classes began to flock to the seaside towns of Blackpool to Skegness, Margate to Barnstable; the sea and its connection represented a sense of expression, freedom and newly found liberation.
Seaside towns thrived in the opening decades of the post war years. An era of low cost flights reflected their decline. The UK’s cost of living crisis will see sways of people give up on Spanish beaches for home soil vacations. Still they come. Some may remain. Still, people move permanently to the coast from the cities, from inland. Brighton, Cornwall, Norfolk, Pembrokeshire, to the Highlands and islands. People will always be drawn to the sea. Its ancient pull, its stirring, its beauty, and the sense of wild nature that lays within us all that we connect to within its presence.
So whatever wild or tame waters you find, whether stream, riverbank, pool, lido, or sea. Seize the opportunity, stay safe, and enjoy your summer.