Five Scenes with Chasms

He is impervious to rain

Leverage

How to Build a Poem from Sticks and Watermusic

Rêverie No. 3

walton-on-thames

The Annual Visit

Here Is Another Place

Safeconduct

indexing sea['s] fret[s]

Sea Kisses Triptych

Float

I did not know it would be like this when I waded into your world. I only intended to get my feet wet. How could I have guessed that you'd be like the tide, rushing up to meet me as quickly as I wandered in?

"I'm not a strong swimmer," I yelled over the noise of the wind and surf.

You laughed and said, "it doesn't matter. Just relax and you'll float."

So I let you lure me in until the water grew deep and I struggled to keep my head above the waves. I drank you in, long deep gulps of you, even though I knew that it would make me feverish and ill. The thirst to know you washed away all reason.

From that first day, when I could still see the shore of my former life, you captured me in your rip current. You brought me gifts; pearls of your wisdom and bits of treasure retrieved from the wrecks of your past. Enchanted by the salty scent of your skin, the perfect shells of your teeth when you smiled and the sharp hook of your poetry and wit, I found myself pulled farther out to sea. I tried to swim parallel to the land, trusting that I'd find my way back to the coast, but it was too late. By the following week, you'd already carried me far away.

How long has it been? Four weeks? Land feels like a dream now and I've almost forgotten my former life. I try to remember the sensation of having solid ground beneath my feet and the certainty of always knowing where I stood; but these memories have been eroded by the persistent waves of your attention.

On windless afternoons, I stare at my reflection in the calm, mirrored surface of the sea. I can hardly recognize myself. Kelp tangles though my hair and my eyes have taken on the turquoise hue of tropical bays. My cold, wet skin is like that of some strange sea creature, puckered with goose bumps. When will I sprout fins and when will my legs finally morph into a fish tail? Sometimes I duck my head beneath the waves and then resurface, enjoying the feeling of heavy droplets caught in the net of my eyelashes. The droplets prism my vision, altering the entire look of the world.

Every day, you encourage me to renounce breath and fully immerse myself in the depths of your world. I want to do so, but I'm frightened that I'll be crushed by weight of this passion. Like this vast ocean, you are my entire world. Even though I resist, I know full well that I'll eventually give in and sink to the sea bed. I find it ironic that the element that will inevitability drown me, is the very thing that buoys me up right now.

You patiently swim beside me, while I float on my back, my face to the sky.

Nine Lessons

The Causeway

Standing on the Edge

Throwing himself into the dawn like a large brass penny the sun gave way to the first light. A giant’s hands, cracking an egg wide open into the morning sky. Small lines of light painted the heaven’s edges in gold leaf whilst upturned boats lay cumbersome like the bellies of sleeping whales. The heavily salted air of the Hebrides stung my skin and eyes awake after the needed drug of heavy sleep. Rising higher the sun warmed my face, sending a glow across my eyelids creating a kaleidoscopic pattern beneath the lids. A sky full of brass warming a vast Atlantic ocean of silver. I stood alone on the edge of a timeless sea. Like an old friend, lapping at my feet, her ebb and flow endlessly turning back to greet me.

I have always lived on the coast. Which, good or bad has created some kind of addiction to it. A restlessness of the soul with the constant coming and going of the tide. Unsettled. A heavy yearning drawing me back to her again and again like the painful infatuation of a first lover. Holding both a shallowness of the heart and depth of the imagination that will deceive and consume you whole. Both friend and foe. Heaven and hell. Life and death.

The haar blanketing the water’s surface was burning away leaving only a light sea mist in its wake. A small fishing boat trailed the oceans ceiling, navigating its way cutting through the water like a pair of scissors in the steady guiding hand of a seamstress. I longed to be on that boat. Heading out into a nothingness. Reaching out for the unreachable line of water meeting sky. Blue bleeding into blue. Heaven meeting earth. Guiding my hand along the horizon I imagined a seam, a stitch binding the edges of a quilt. An earth etched in a braille for me to trace and read.  All at once I had the urge to plunge myself into the minty coolness of the peppermint waters. Breaking the oceans ceiling. Gasping for breath. Until reaching the horizon, I would unpick the earth’s seams and climb out. Or maybe diving deep I would wrap myself in the dark ribbons of wavering seaweed and stay there. Wrapped tightly into the inky blackness like a dormant seed shielding for the spring. A salty balm. A peppermint shock. Healing, always healing.   

It is the sheer restlessness of the ocean that I yearn for. As if calling out to my own restlessness she thirsts for mutual friendship. Drenching me with a peace that floods and absorbs into the skin through osmosis. The extreme and unapologetic nature in which she performs and changes her mind pulls me close to the edge. I like extremes. Always have done. Living on the edge of the Atlantic is one of those extremes. Like living on the edge of the world. Where the wind blows so strong it could whip you into the sea if you weren’t holding on. Sometimes it does. They get swept away into the depths and the coastguard is phoned, and the people say ‘It’s dangerous on the edge’, ‘Too close to the edge was she’. The Hebrides where the wind screams through the island like a woman gone mad. Where the sea turns a strange transparency of silver and blue, an alcoholic elixir of salt meeting peat meeting whiskey. The Hebrides where the day’s papers don’t make it onto the boat and passive aggressive sheep man the roads like a wollen mafia. Where the smoke of peat streams though the air like incense mixing into the elixir of the angels-share. Unapologetic landscapes wrapped within the confines of an unapologetic sea. The Hebrides. The creator of hardy people and even hardier wildlife. Dark blotches of rock and peat struck down into opal and topaz waters. As if by the heavy handed jaw of a giant the earth was chewed up and spat back out again.

The tide now high and still, drowned the ribboning seaweed creating inky blotches at my feet. A seal, huffing out an exaggerated breath, hauled itself out of the water and shining, draped itself over the harsh black rock before singing out for a mate. A halcyon calmness laid the water flat. As if exhausted she had decided the midnight oil was burned and she would now lie down to rest. She wouldn’t last though. For as beautiful as she is I have come to know the ocean is as fickle. It would not be long, I thought, opening my eyes to the warmth of a strengthening sun. It would not be long before enraged she would arch and crash. Grabbing at the land’s seams, unpicking the earth until he fell away back into her. Loud and disorderly like a drunk, unaccepting of the midnight bell. Frightening and powerful. Contorting her face in anger and clutching whatever she’d been left within her grasp to hurl and throw back onto the land. Beautiful and extreme. Swinging in the balance of the two.  

The fishing boat was now but a mark. A small mustard seed of faith upon a weaving of iridescent  thread. A careless smudge of charcoal on the artist’s ready canvas. I wondered what the fisherman was thinking. Was he like me? Addicted to teetering on the edge. Adventuring to find the end seam.Yearning, always yearning to fall off into the blue. Or maybe it was simpler than that and he wanted solely to catch the day’s daily bread. A gannet took my eye like a bright star. An arrow falling fast and free from the heavens before striking the oceans eye with unmeasurable precision. I traced him gently bobbing back, up out of the inky depths empty mouthed. I stood for a long time watching him, feeling in some way connected to his unending efforts. Again and again and again. Mastering a skill for survival. For aren’t we all? Connected I mean. Plunging ourselves into the world’s waters to see what we can find to fill us? Are we not all like the gannets wings dipped into the night rising up into the mornings sun. Coming up time and time again empty handed until maturity and practice helps us hit the bullseye. Like small smudges upon the waters of life, sailing into the distance of an unreachable line. Standing, on the edge of the world.

Birdlife of British Columbia

why do I feel bad for a mosquito drowning in wax by the wick of a candle I lit to keep it away?

it’s healthy to be surrounded by more animals than human persons

I sit with the chickens feeding them kale for twenty minutes and prefer them to my own family

osprey eagle heron blue-jay woodpecker hummingbird robin

upwards from the pile of birdshit on the doormat hangs a swallows’ mud-nest stuck to the wood panels by sheer force of will. the blue and amber shining birds become accustomed to us. their eggs hatch and sharp beaks open and close like monstrous flytraps

what makes the mother swallow chirp at me when she catches me watching

will they tend to her in old age? build her a hospice nest? I don’t understand it

it is not for me to understand. it’s fine

after a heavy-bitten night I awake to a spider in the window trapping a fly, wrapping it up between all of its hot spidery legs until the buzzing goes out

thank you, I tell the arachnid guardian, but she does not care

in the sea of a warm evening the dog follows me playing the role of seal. we wade out into the oncoming tide

I pick my way through seaweed and barnacles on guard for whatever lurks beneath my heavy feet

bite me to remind me of your power on unceded, occupied, and stolen land

I love to see the heron shit in swooping ribbons cascading downwards as it takes it ridiculous wings up to the trees, legs dangling like an afterthought

Google: are herons heterosexual flamingos

the woods at night hung in shadow full of no one tempt me inwards an opening into a hundred horror stories

about people who do not want to be spat back out

and will never be seen again

I desire to know where they go and so we keep following each other in

curiosity kills and the world overwhelms but trees subdue,

silent and menacing like an elder you struggle to trust

indoors at night I dream of being fucked under the moon on a bed of moss,

nipples stone from the cold damp air, orgasm echoing between mountain walls

dirt from the island sticks under my fingernails all the way back to the mainland

where I will keep it until I return to submit my body to the birds and the bees,

the hills and the sea

for now I drift off to a mosquito’s lullaby and scratch until I bleed.

Amphitrite in neoprene

Bathing Suit

#72: Marks

The undergrowth is soft with occasional twigs. Light through the trees comes from my left. It’s fresh, like morning. I must be walking south. There are wires. Why are there wires in my arm, my wrist? My pulse is fast. I hear a mechanical noise. A beat. I’m beating. I’m tapping out a message. I’m furious. About what? My pace quickens. Now it’s humid. Please don’t let there be a shack at the end of the track. There’s a shack at the end of the track. I run. My feet are heavy. I can’t move. Run, the voice says. I’m trying but the shack’s getting closer. The shack has a jacuzzi. Mrs Johnson is in the jacuzzi. I want to talk to you, she says. About what? About your essay on Lord of the Flies. Get in. She hands me my jotter and slides under the water. There are red marks all over the essay. When she surfaces, she has popcorn and root beer. Want some? We swap. You’ll never get into Oxford writing rubbish like this. She slides under again. I count to thirty and slide under myself. I count to sixty. One hundred and eighty. My jotter drifts across my eyeline. The words have slipped. Three hundred. I turn a page. All the corrections are a mess.

Insignificance

[untitled]

Autobiography of the river
‘Rishi Ganga’

The first thing I ever saw was the sun kissing the tip of the Nanda Devi. And my journey began from there. I flowed down the snow-capped mountains, awed by the sights I saw. In a few months, I learnt that I was the source of life for everyone. At the break of dawn, old Pandits would come and dip themselves in my waters chanting mantras while I bowed respectfully before them. There were little children who would splash in my water while their mothers would squat in ankle deep waters, washing their clothes. Then there were old men who would come and drink my water after their strenuous work. But everybody treated me with reverence.

I realised I was a part of one of their most holy rivers, the Ganga. My waters were pure and holy. There were all these small tributaries which would come and join me. But I hated a few of them. They were dirty and garbage filled. I didn’t like that they would come and join my clean waters. So, I used to tease them and not let them come and dirty my waters.

One day I saw an extremely muddy and impure tributary. I started teasing him in the hope that my waters wouldn’t become dirty. That tributary became angry and shouted this at me, “You conceited river! You’ll learn soon. You are anyways headed towards the city where you will reach the sewage and become much dirtier than me also!” I was flabbergasted but I still said, “I will never ever become as dirty as you!” Saying this, I continued on my journey. And one day, I reached my ever-awaited dream. The city. It was beautiful. This was way better than the mountains I had previously lived in. Even if there wasn’t much space in the city, it at least prevented the tributaries from coming and joining my waters. I roamed about happily taking in the sights I saw. I may not have been treated as well as I was in the mountains but I still had prestige over here.

As I went about more and more, people started treating me badly. They threw cans, plastic bottles and many other things into me. Months and months rolled by and I became more and more polluted with all sorts of rubbish. And I asked myself, “Was this the life I longed for?” Much later in my life, I came across that old tributary. It grinned when it saw me. “So”, it said. “You are much dirtier than me, just like I said.” I looked ashamed, knowing that I couldn’t argue that. Seeing my face, it softened. “Well old chap, I am sorry about you. But I can’t give you anything but bad news. You are heading for the sewage.” I looked up, wide-eyed when I heard the last word. I prayed and prayed to the Gods that I wouldn’t have to go there. But my nose had already picked up the stench of the dreaded place. Soon, I could see the grills of the drain. I couldn’t even imagine what all was floating about in it. Slowly, my waters started seeping into the spaces between the grills. I could do nothing but helplessly stare in horror. To save my eyes from seeing the sights I saw, I closed them. And when I did, I saw the sun kissing the peak of the Nanda Devi.

Bapteesim

Water

Dendrites and Stars

     I make it a practice to walk, hike or bike each day. The habit is an old one. I grew up with forty-six other children on a subdivision block we called 21st Street. Most anytime I walked out the front door, I found friends eager to play. In the unencumbered time and space, my sense of self in relationship to the outside world settled in and with it, a deep sense of well-being. 

     Now in my sixties, I can’t wait to open the front door and head out. In good weather I often ride my bike along the North Fork of the Elk River in rural North Routt County. The paved road is called Seed House Road and passes by small, residential properties, often with horses in an adjoining pasture, or some part-time homes, like Grandma’s Cabin tucked away in the pine and aspen near the river. 

     My ride begins easily into the shade of aspens where the air cools and sections of the North Fork of the Elk stretch out below the road. I eagerly follow its wind. As the road opens, the snowcapped divide on the horizon appears with sightings of Little Agnes and Big Agnes, Dome Peak, and the highest pinnacle, Mount Zirkel, at 12,180 feet, where summer may last six weeks to eight weeks depending upon the season.  

     There at the headwaters of the North Fork, the wilderness consists of a diverse ecosystem from sagebrush meadows in the lower areas, through pine and spruce/fir forests and on up to alpine tundra. Further on, where I eventually circle and turn around for my return ride home, the asphalt gives way to gravel and those seeking hiking trails, fishing, and high mountain lakes drive further on to the Slavonia Trailhead, to access the wilderness areas in the Park Range and Sierra Madre of the Continental Divide.

     As I pedal, I’m always intrigued with the lap of the river, its speed, and its flow. I contemplate the dynamic transformation of the waterway, from snow crystal to water droplet to roiling river in April, May and June. I envision in the ambitious, headlong runoff, the geo-metrical elements once possessed by those crystals: needles, plates and columns capped with dendrites and stars. High above in the deep snowpack, they now ease, relax, and let go of their organization and structure, becoming fluid, merging with all the other remnants of winter storms and silent nights. 

     I later learn the pace of the transformation is determined by overnight temperatures and the radiation from the sun. Heat converts the snow particles into water and gravity pulls the water to the ground. Then over granite, roots, moss and old soil it flows where resistance is least, into the shade and shadow of aspen lined creeks like Hinman Creek, which joins Lester Creek, Colton Creek and Willow Creek from the Hahn’s Peak Basin to become the North Fork.

     On down the road I cross Colton Creek and pass by the guest ranch where an old gardening friend grew lettuce, rhubarb, and tomatoes at an elevation of 8000 feet. In another half-mile, it’s Johnny Snyder’s place, a small spot filled with an old square-log home he built and chinked himself, the smoke from his woodstove often drifting up and away over the North Fork. 

    In 1960, Johnny came to the valley from Pennsylvania in a 1938 blue Pontiac pick-up. No one knows why. Described as a hard worker, a self-starter, he hired out first as a ranch hand and then as a woodsman, working the forests for logs and firewood. He, at one time, raised mink, the abandoned cages still intact near his house. 

     Late this past summer, Johnny carefully walked up the ramp to the local Clark Store. I’ve known of him for forty years. That morning, I thought, surely he’s in his eighties. A friend told me he saw him that day, too. Johnny told him, “I’ve got the cancer.” A month later, neighbors found Johnny dead of a heart attack near the kitchen sink. Even though I had concluded that his reclusive heart had found a home embedded in the woods and the land, I was saddened by Johnny dying alone. 

     Where the pavement ends and the gravel begins, I loop around a small parking lot, stop, and unclip my shoes. To the east, I assess the melt on the divide, watching for the last of winter’s remains; and then back to the west, Sand Mountain stands near my point of return. A small meadow neighbors my resting spot and in the still and quiet of the open land and high divide, I find a persistent peace. 

     In the respite, I often consider the metamorphosis of those columns, plates, dendrites and stars from crystalline form to water drop, roiling river and back again to winter’s crystals. I ask myself, what similar transmutation do I understand as I stand bound to this earthly life. I can only relate to one transformation – from a spirit conceived, physically embodied, and born into the world. And then upon death, a complete change of form: the embodiment, the physical presence transformed back to spirit, just as crystalline forms melt to water drops and roiling river and back again to winter snows on the divide.

      Recently, I recalled the time before my granddaughter was born, when she didn’t exist in a physical form. Then I fast forward and she’s wiggling in my arms and tracking me with her eyes, both her body and sweet spirit embedded in my life. Was her spirit traveling the world before it was captured to be here on earth in the natural world? 

     When I work at answering this question, I often think of my late mother. My kitchen window frames a view of the wilderness area near the North Fork. As I wash dishes, I imagine my mother’s spirit sailing there on the wind and wonder, if I try sailing with her will we know one another again. I don’t know. But I’ll keep asking each time I ride along the North Fork feeling the wash of the wave of the waterway just below Seed House Road.

Wednesday

The Ego of the Marsh

There is a Sea

The time I have spent on checking the weather report and my horoscope must, all in all, amount to a couple of years of my life by now. The weather report and horoscope checking took place with higher frequency in some periods (when at obsessive rates of several times a day it correlated with depressive episodes which always felt much like struggling through water), but the need to check in with the solar system and atmospheric conditions in order to decide on things like which colour of t-shirt to wear has been a constant. 

(Today, 6 July, it is 16 degrees with rain showers. I am surprised to find that people are wearing summer clothes here, and surprised that whenever the sun peeks out, it is too warm to wear a jacket. It is humid and windy. The wind makes the leaves on the big tree in the neighbouring backyard look like waves on a green sea stuck between grey brick-stone walls.)

Already as a child my zodiac was important to me. Only, there had been a slight misunderstanding: Maybe because I loved fairy tales and was fascinated with the fairy tale of The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen, I was sure I was a Mermaid, not a Virgo (in Danish, my native language, the words are Havfrue and Jomfru—easy to confuse, if you want to). When I at some point was able to read my own horoscope and couldn’t find the Mermaid, I experienced what I suppose was my first identity crises. It is the sort of pain that most grown-ups cannot understand or take seriously: the pain and grief of the loss of your mermaid self. 

The fairy tale of the Little Mermaid in its original version is rather sad and disturbing. In the end, the mermaid does not get the prince (who until then has kept her as a kind of dancing pet) but dissolves into sea foam. What especially struck me was the pain she had to go through to turn her fish tail into legs (she felt every step like walking on knives). Still, she did it, to marry a human prince, and through that marriage gain an eternal human soul. But instead of being rewarded for her sacrifice, she dies of heartbreak. How romantic and cruel. Hardly a story to model your budding identity on. 

Apart from H.C. Andersen fairy tales, I, like many other Danish children, also read Peter Madsen’s Valhalla comics (showing the full cast of gods, all as highly fallible, comical, and less than god-like characters), and loved them. In my naivete, it wasn’t until I travelled in Germany that I realised to what extend Norse mythology and the idea of Scandinavia was aesthetically ingrained in Nazi ideology. It led me to the conclusion that I had to review my fascination with astrology, weather, romantic fairy tales, and mythology, all in one pack; with the fact that I seem to have an affinity for banal mysticism.

Romanticism, I came to understand, is the shadow-side of enlightenment and of democracy. It is the mythic past, the emo-national; a fertile soil for cultivating nationalism and its irrational pride and xenophobia. It is the perfect narrative for deciding who “the right people” are. But because I couldn’t rid myself of my childhood infatuation with Valhalla and fairy tales, I really wanted these stories to offer something that didn’t have to do with an invented mythic past, foundational for Nordic and national pride. And I wanted to understand why, when the little mermaid wanted so badly to be a human, did I want to be a mermaid?

The German romantic painter Casper David Friedrich created several paintings featuring centrally placed characters with their back turned to the spectator, looking (together with the spectator) out over a seascape. The most spectacular and famous of these paintings is Der Mönch am Meer (The Monk by the Sea). The monk stands alone in front of an ominous sea, a great nothingness that instead of awakening the romantic, painful longing to be part of something bigger, more beautiful and eternal, mostly just confronts the spectator with herself. 

In a disputed review of the painting, Clemens Brentano and Heinrich von Kleist wrote: “Nothing could be sadder or more discomfited than just this position in the world: the single spark of life in the vast realms of death, the lonely center in the lonely circle.”

Personally, however, I find the painting elevating. Apparently so did Adolf Hitler, who was a big fan of Casper David Friedrich. On the Tate’s website it says about the painting that “the core meaning of Friedrich’s paintings lies in the viewer’s own interpretation, and there is nothing in them that does not already exist in the viewer’s heart and mind.[i]”

Which sounds like the “mirror of Erised” in Harry Potter (which shows the deepest desire of one’s heart), and the question arises: What did Hitler see in there? What reflection did the romantic sea cast back? 

I wonder, because to me, the painting expresses a longing for belonging.

Mönch am Meer (along with other works of romantic art, like Beethoven’s symphonies) is often seen as aestheticization of Kant’s ideas on the sublime: The sublime nature that elevates us through its immenseness by mirroring the inner immenseness of our humanity; an experience that is not caused by beauty as such, but by awe[ii]. The sea that the monk is looking at is frightening rather than beautiful. Uncanny, but not evil. Powerful and strange.

(This evening I go for a walk. Looking out on the weather from the inside, it seems stable in its greyness, a little cold. It will require a rain jacket. I forgot to pack mine but have borrowed one from my mom. As I walk around the lakes in Copenhagen, I zip up the jacket, then unzip, take it off, take of my thin sweater underneath, then I put it all back on when it starts raining again. But I start sweating under it all the moment the sun comes out 10 minutes later. I forgot the degree to which the weather is constantly changing here. No one else—the walkers, drinkers, joggers, talkers, pram strollers—seem to mind.)

What is the connection between the lonely romantic wanderer, the misunderstood genius with her Weltschmerz on one side, and the longing for a nation on the other; to belong with the best and the most perfect of people: the sublime nation? Is it just the need to belong, filtered through a narcissist inclination? 

The way romanticism worships myths and the past, mermaids and thunder gods, and the way romanticism in turn is instrumental to nationalism reminds me of what Joseph Campbell writes about myths: on one side they express a universal humanity, because such myths exist in every culture, on the other side, they’re always dangerous when taken at face-value and understood to express the superior uniqueness of one particular culture[iii].

Does romantic art express the longing for home caused by the forgetting of Being, as Heidegger[iv] (who, among other things, was a Nazi) called it?—That we have an uncanny, unheimlich, feeling stirring in our gut, coming from the fact that we, in order to live a normal everyday life, have to suppress that we (or, most people) haven’t understood the first thing about Being (like, what is the purpose of our existence?). A state that holds great potential for anxiety. 

Like Norse mythology and romantic art, Heidegger’s philosophy was used in the Nazi project, where his ideas about authentic Being were translated into the Being of the Authentic People—an elusive polis. Again, I come to think of the little mermaid, who decides that there is no means not worthy of the goal: to be a real human with a divine soul. To belong, in other words. To escape the (perceived) inferior realm of nature, of otherness, by transcending it and rising above. 

Usually, little mermaids turn into seafoam when they die, we understand from H.C. Andersen’s fairy tale. To me, that seems less frightening than a mutilating process of turning a fish tail into human legs, losing your voice, and sacrificing your life for a person who patronises you. I wonder if H.C. Andersen didn’t feel the same way, spending most of his life, as it were, at the periphery of the bourgeoisie, always on the border to that otherness that so many of his stories circle around. If anything, the mermaid turning into seafoam is a perfectly poetic idea of returning home, of again becoming one with that nature that we, romantic individuals, have been so painfully severed from. I’d chose seafoam any time: For you are water and to water you shall return? 

The idea of being water is also one the hydro-feminist Astrida Neimanis contemplates: “Even while in constant motion, water is also a planetary archive of meaning and matter. To drink a glass of water is to ingest the ghosts of bodies that haunt the water.”[v]This essay, On Becoming a Body of Water, has a mystical quality that reminds me of Romanticism in the way it describes both a connection and disconnection between humans and nature. Similar to the ideas set forth in the book Hypersea: Life on the Land[vi] (that all living beings on land carry a remnant of the ocean in their tissue, and that this strategy is what enabled life on land) it is an interesting intersection between metaphysics and biology.

I’ve been mesmerized by the ideas of hydro-feminism for a while and have come to think of it as eco-feminist romanticism, where water is a symbol for our relation to the planet, each other, and ourselves. One that focuses on connectedness rather than loneliness and doesn’t differ between body and soul. The watery body invites nature inside, as close as it gets. It invites us all inside everything, and everything inside us. 

It makes me think of the sci-fi classic Dune, where when someone dies their tribe inherits their water, literally. Such a ceremony makes sense in a world where there is no room for disconnect, only for adaptation to the environment. But in this world, body fluids are taboo – they are waste, to be flushed out into the sea, into the great oblivion of “nature”. In turn, however, following Neimanis’s water logic, it is all flushed out into ourselves. We inherit the water of previous generations whether we like it or not. 

With the idea of the watery body, Neimanis offers an aesthetic idea that does not confine our bodies to clay, dust, cultural or biological functions: The symbol of water offers a perspective on Being, where interconnectedness is the a priori, rather than authenticity. And for me, thinking this way leads to a deep sense of fulfilment, because the most obvious conclusion I can think of, is that, in a sense, all humans already are mermaids—of the hypersea: We all already belong.

(On Monday, 3 August, we take the ferry from Gedser. The sun is fresh and clear. The ferry arrives in Rostock, and we leave the coast for a swampier inland; Berlin melting in sudden heat with electric rains around the corner.)