Composition: Ocean resurface

Composition: Ocean resurfaceXK

#fiction, #jetsetlife, #ocean, #liquidity, #existentialism

ON THE YACHT Before boarding the yacht, I had pictured the front as the most enjoyable place of a boat. And, ever since Hussein invited me to accompany him and a few of his friends on the yacht, I had pictured myself sitting at the fore, greeting the sea, sensing the wind as if it was the freedom surrounding me. It was a fantasy. Everyone wanders around, every now and then, with utterly silly daydreams of having lives that aren’t theirs, no matter how dreadful or splendid our original lives may be.

But in reality I preferred to sit at the stern, at the furthermost end of the yacht, looking at how the horizon swallowed the sea. There, at the furthermost end of my vision, I saw that history, as well as the sea herself, is an ocean. The pasts are depths that stretch down towards the bottom of the beginning. The present is no more and no less than a surface—with it’s complex physics, yet simple actuality of surface tension. Whilst every rainfall and river is a future falling down into it, warping the tension with a constant penetration of presents. And, whatever glimpse we may grasp of the bottom is seen through the mirror of a surface. The focal point of the beginning rests in the parts of the present which we’re not aware of. The surface is inevitable, just like the present is in the act of gazing into the depths of the past.

MARILYN I had this picture I saw the other day, in the library of Princess Grace, in my mind. It depicted Marilyn Monroe sitting in a striped bathing suit, reading the colossal Ulysses. The contrast fascinated me: Society’s assumed stupidity of Monroe, against the idea of refinement and education connected to the reading of Ulysses. I said to myself, well that’s an ideal—an educated, slightly sad mermaid. I wanted to embody the picture. I wanted to stage it in order to honor it. I wanted to make all that I saw in the picture exist once more. Maybe it was out of obsession, or maybe it was out of care, but I wanted it to become materialized in my presence. The fore of a yacht would be perfect for this embodiment; transcending the linearity of time in front of an endless field of baby blue, which is how the mediterranean looks from the harbour of Monaco.

Maybe all of this came to my mind solely because I already knew, and was thinking quite much about, that I would spend the following week on a royal yacht out on the mediterranean. The tricky thing was

that I would never be able to pull off being the subject of this image imprinted in my mind. I obviously lacked the privilege of good looks: I have glasses and lips not much thicker than the line of eyelashes on a woman in a fashion magazine. My eyelashes, contrary to theirs, are sparse like a tree during the end of autumn. Honestly, I think I resemble James Joyce more than Marilyn Monroe. So, rather than being fascinated by the fact that the book was held by her, I was fascinated by Marilyn herself; how she was holding the book, lost in the act of reading, unaware of reality despite the gazing of the camera and the sound of the shutter. And now, she’s carried away beyond the boundaries of not only her life, but life itself; used and interpreted whilst she and all subjects of all photographs are, or inevitably will be, dead.

FLAWS OF FORE The future, most of the time, doesn’t turn out how you pictured it would, not even the smallest of details. I knew this and I have known it for a very long time but, either way, I really believed I would enjoy sitting at the fore. But, surprisingly or not, I didn’t like it at all. It was too difficult to see, and likewise impossible to enjoy, the sea from there. And, after all, the sea was the main reason for my enthusiasm of being on board. When everything comes towards you, as it tends to do when you stand at the fore, it’s like the whole world lies within your decision. In one sense you see everything, but you overlook whatever that is. There are no details in the world you see, and since as they say God dwells in the details, you can’t see anything. This happens without you knowing that you’re actually seeing nothing. The impressions scatter all over your senses, because without melancholia there is no sense of real attention. And how can there even be the slightest melancholia when everything comes towards you—even if you’re not moving? At the fore, the ocean—the most important part of a boat—can barely be seen. You see the foam, you see the delightful blues in the distance, you see islands and islets, birds and horizons. But the depths, the deep blues of the seas, the swirls that write secrets and mysteries on the surface of water, they are all impossible to notice. Only at the stern can you see them. At the stern everything is in a constant act of leaving, the horizon swallows the reality that once has been and it engrosses the whole sea you find yourself resting upon. At night, even the light drowns among the streams of the ink-black-dark water, in the spots of our bodies we can’t see.

OCEAN RESURFACE The ocean is not a segregated object, bisected into parts. It’s not an object nor a thing. The ocean is a habitus, a way of life, it’s the source as well as the end for everything. The ocean is bigger than the land that we believe encircles it. Currents are constantly pulling up the cold water of the depths, the segments of the bottom, surfacing secrets by drowning what is known. That’s how the warm water gets cooler, how the present becomes the past. The present becomes the past not by the future pressing it down—as if the past was a drowned head, and the future the hands who drowned the head of the present—but by the constant resurfacing of the past, which gives the present its ability to fall. History doesn’t repeat itself nor is it built by constant progress. History is neither circular nor linear—it is resurfacing. The surface (as a phenomenon of surface) is always the same. The water creates the constant shifting of the surface. The rain and the rivers which fall into the ocean do not stop upon its surface, as the future that falls into the present isn’t just piled upon it. The passing of time is not a modality of the initiative of the future pressing down the bottom of the pile of the present into the shadows of the past. That’s not how the penetration of time nor the hydrological cycle works: the idea of linear movements, from future to present to past, is unexampled simply because it’s not true. Rather, the future transforms into the past in one single event. Only through the past can the present come into being. At the moment the water, entailed by a raindrop or carried by the stream of a river, enters the ocean it falls under its surface. And there, we see how the past is what carries what once was the future up to the surface of the present. The present is the past, and everything that has been the future resting onto the border of heaven. A heaven made up of air, which is the end result of all our breaths. What breathing has been and what it becomes. The surface of the ocean is a plain of pasts and futures, into which we spread the ashes of those whom we have been, and whom we once wanted to become.