Sea Dreaming 1
‘The sea extends its privilege’ said John who’d been here long enough to feel that for all the life lived outside was also the other, within. Then outside vision of sea, sky or sun conjured from within a strength to replace that nefarious hellish one of the battlefield. To be alive and focused beside that inside space triggered from without, was, just for that moment, to be immortal’.
He was looking out over the sea, no longer in the firing line of the Great War, but in a mansion converted into a hospital for recovering soldiers. ‘If longing to look out over this vista is as crazy as wanting to look out over eternity, here it is’ he said to the nurse, ‘coming in waves like dreams set down before me on a real plate on a real table full with real food in my real life. Life the dream. The sea. To see too to imagine. Not just to be afloat upon it but within its caress, a hair’s breadth away from death and still alive. I know I am lucky to be alive.’ Plumping his pillows then patting his good shoulder with long, firm pats, the nurse said, ‘sit up now and believe it’.
‘The wind in the trees. A new expansiveness that touches the soul. That’s what I find here in this horizontal place, inside and outside this mansion’ said Laurie almost a hundred years later. She’d not had John’s experiences. She’d never known him. Nor the groans of the others recovering here, or that those groans had been more gentle than the ones of the dying who’d never make it back across the water.
Although he was never to know her John’s uplifting, good thoughts instilled by his position high up in the attic room where he’d sat up in bed against the pillows the nurse had plumped, looking down upon the Channel – the sea full in his face – would be shared by Laurie all that time later. She’d come to the end of a never ending life to be beginning it anew. She was having them for the first time, these constantly renewing old thoughts, as if a place could magnify the emotions others had lodged in its very walls. Not unlike him she would say from her ground floor rooms looking out over the green-lawned gardens to the sea beyond, ‘the real life is set upon the ocean of life, a life house tipping its boughs into the swelling ocean.’
‘After I’d been shot down I knew I was alright’ said John, ‘but also that something was terribly wrong. My brother, hit the second before me, was down too, lying absolutely motionless, a pool of blood fanning out around his body. I didn’t know then that he was dead, but when I was heaved on to a stretcher too weak to cry out or wave my arms towards him, the stretcher bearer had shaken his head, ‘bullet through the heart. Yours went through your shoulder’, and I was borne off helplessly to a regimental aid post at the edge of the battlefield. Other wounded struggled alone. Some hobbled propped up by a mate. Could one have been my brother after all? I tried to raise my head to see. None was. In the shelter of the dressing station my shoulder was treated for the hole that had been left. No bullet had lodged. I was given an anti-tetanus injection and helpfully told I was in a mess.’
‘Tomorrow, my moving in day,’ Laurie had said, ‘would very soon be today. Happenings follow a wriggling pattern like a meandering stream whose route has already been etched out, events already subscribed to, occurring not chronologically but side by side, in parallel but not conjunction, time being the system which, forming a drop on the ceiling of the soul like saliva on the roof of the mouth, prevents everything from happening at once.
‘The night before today I dreamt I was leading the people of the city who’d shared my life for two decades on a tour that was to lead to my house upon the seashore sea-line’ she said. I would not lead them along the road that skirted it but down along the beach. They would walk the littoral pounded by the roar of the incoming waves, their forms outlined by the foaming white spume, the life that had sometimes resembled a dream now the dream’.
‘I couldn’t say whether it was an advantage to know hell on earth where nothing could get worse because I didn’t know then if I would return from it’, said John. ‘We’d forced ourselves forward through knee high mud. Beside us men were being blown to pieces. Pawns in a herd-minded forward assault we couldn’t pause to see who. We couldn’t hesitate. We couldn’t stop. We couldn’t run away. And either way, stay and fight or run for your life, one hit and we’d be dead. At night there was no respite from the torment. Hell was real. Inescapable. The images that wouldn’t go away belonged to my tortured consciousness alone. Always mine the identity I couldn’t let go of, a reality as trapping as war. Real too the unbearable tiredness of my body. The end of my brother. The frailty of flesh splattered sky high. The mess of many a body and every mind. The chaos with no redeeming, unifying principle.’
‘It doesn’t matter’ said Laurie ‘that I’ve not got to my house beside the sea before. I’ve been travelling for so long. Kuala Lumpa. Rama Pleasurama. Rajastan. Umba Lunka. Bexhill even. Places that lead inevitably down to the sea as surely as island to sea, earth to water, fire to air. But now I have and am, today, coming home. As if I’ve been here all my life, a ship crashing, cutting, cruising the breaking crests. But that’s isn’t all. All my life I’ve been here on the edge of the stunning swell, the wild and windy wet, the swaying, swelling trees where foxes run half seen, not just because of semi crepuscular light but because, as has been said, events happening in parallel worlds happen simultaneously, not in time. The lap of the eternal sea swell breaks eternally over stones. To live by the sea is to live eternally beside a little bit of what goes on forever.’
‘Despite being wracked with pain I was reassured just a little bit’, said John. ‘that just a little bit of a system existed in the face of the eternally unmanageable chaos on the Western Front. The ambulance took me to a casualty clearing behind the line. A train to a base hospital. A surgeon knew that my wound was damage to the brachial plexus, a network of nerves that conducted messages from the spinal cord through neck and shoulder to arm and hand. I just wanted the pain to end. I hardly heard that I needed surgery to repair blood vessel damage. But after I did hear the surgeon who reassured. I would not be one of the one in four who died of sub-clavian artery wounds. Nor would I be sent back to the Front to fight. The system looked ok to me from there and then.’
‘Between the suck and the wash of the trembling waves that quiver and break on the pebbled shore – is the silence’ said Laurie. ‘At night waves coming in at an angle from the east spray out like a fan of glittering teeth. When I woke from the first night in my house on the ocean of life I saw the sea there grey under the greyest of clouds, exotic. And every other morning too. In every weather.’
‘Often on the Eastern Front in the carnage of battlefields and the bewildered chaos of retreats, there was no system’ said the nurse who’d been in Serbia but now tended John at the mansion. ‘The wounded’, she said, ‘had arrived in bullock wagons with blood stained bandages that had never been changed – many had died on the way – and in a Serbian town lain in their uniforms just as they’d been found in the trenches. They swarmed with lice on floors of hospitals, hotels or shops on boards or little beds of straw with no blankets to keep them warm in the freezing Serbian nights.’
‘The winds beat outside’ said Laurie, ‘but inside a champagne, coral sandy like carpet is marked by shoe prints that can be swept away – not by the sea’s waves but a hoover sucking up dust and crumbs. The shoreline-shaped sweeps in its pile caused by flooding delight me. Here in this chameleon shimmer, this fine-sand softness under foot is reminder of life’s relish-able textures. Not the deep dark mud of Wilfred Owen’s trenches, but a cradling sea, flickering, glistening and stretching. You don’t need to avoid this sea like soldiers did the mud, and while you observe it a little bit of it could become a little bit of what you are, without you being drowned or shot.’
‘Hospitals and dressing stations were set up in disused barracks, schools, convents, railway stations, or in shattered towns and villages’ the nurse had said, ‘in ambulance trains, hospital ships, under canvas on hills, in valleys and lonely countryside. Often there were no surgeons like the one you had. Sometimes I and another nurse had to perform operations by ourselves’.
‘In case it’s escaped your attention’ Laurie wrote to Ess, ‘and I’m not sure how much attention you’ve left, I’m no longer in the city, but a stone’s throw away. It would be good if you could throw the stone and come down to this place. A woodpecker pecks for a worm in the lawn outside. A robin with wings whizzing like a humming bird’s hovers at the window with a mouthful of worm. A resident crow attacks a pigeon as if it were a worm trespassing on its property and its mouth bulges with pigeon quill and mottled grey white feathers.’
‘My wound’ had said John who was recovering, ‘will always cause an imbalance in the way I move. It has something to do with muscles or nerves damaged between shoulder and back that makes the torso lopsided. Meaning hereafter will be different for me. Not the pursuit of perfection through beauty or wealth, for I will never have the bodily grace I want now, nor the courage that went with it. The swiftness of my mind will carry me but it will be too strong for my body. It will not help when I fail before I reach the end and fall in a helpless heap.’
Ess would not respond with a full mouth, that is with words that were articulate, let alone come down to see her, Laurie knew, but she would say, ‘though these rooms are as big as the sea they are warm and dry, not cold and wet. It is civilised on the edge of this cliff with grand Victorian buildings, including a hotel literally called The Grand, whose windows in their uppermost parts peer out like lambent eyes from their roofs.’
‘But when the nurse, whose imagination is, I see, her body, comes into the room, everything seems to stand still’ said John. ‘She can imagine nothing beyond the circle cast by her body, going out before her like a torch down a dark lane, bringing one thing after another out of the darkness and into her dazzling ring of light. ‘Therefore’, she said when I told her this, ‘trauma is the blurring of light’’.
‘Yet on nights when the wind off the sea is cold and ebrasive’, Laurie continued to Ess, ‘the holm oak and sycamore which line the upper cliff are bent low, and the lush undergrowth of the undercliff offers the little protection of a half cultivated wilderness. Here it is obvious but has yet to come to be: how can anything offer protection when the whole endearing mass of us and what we as civilisation create, will be undermined by our inevitable demise, let alone our wars? Still, forgetting their temporality, the buildings and the hotels do just that. They are feigning, and laughing if buildings can, as we must too. Nor is there need to batter down these walls, this protection, this living behind curtains. The sea will if it wants. ’
‘Here John and I are protected, encapsulated in grand buildings’ thought the nurse, ‘but in the fighting out there across the sea the society we’ve built up, slowly, is threatened by destruction, destroying us anyway.’
‘It’s not just our temporality but the vulnerability of a gale battered land upon whose edge we sit with nothing but the sea and France between us and Spain that makes our sad reliance on the impossible resilience of matter laughable’, thought Laurie out loud almost a hundred years later.
‘I’ve been here long enough now to feel the privilege’ John repeated to the nurse, ‘that for all the life lived outside is also another, within, undamaged. And that that one outside image, the sea, can replace the one of the battlefield. And to be alive is to be immortal just for that moment of immortality, for ever.’
He was looking out over the sea, no longer in the firing line of the Great War, but in a mansion converted into a hospital for recovering soldiers. ‘If longing to look out over this vista is as crazy as wanting to look out over eternity, here it is’ he said to the nurse, ‘coming in waves like dreams set down before me on a real plate on a real table full with real food in my real life. Life the dream. The sea. To see too to imagine. Not just to be afloat upon it but within its caress, a hair’s breadth away from death and still alive. I know I am lucky to be alive.’ Plumping his pillows then patting his good shoulder with long, firm pats, the nurse said, ‘sit up now and believe it’.
‘The wind in the trees. A new expansiveness that touches the soul. That’s what I find here in this horizontal place, inside and outside this mansion’ said Laurie almost a hundred years later. She’d not had John’s experiences. She’d never known him. Nor the groans of the others recovering here, or that those groans had been more gentle than the ones of the dying who’d never make it back across the water.
Although he was never to know her John’s uplifting, good thoughts instilled by his position high up in the attic room where he’d sat up in bed against the pillows the nurse had plumped, looking down upon the Channel – the sea full in his face – would be shared by Laurie all that time later. She’d come to the end of a never ending life to be beginning it anew. She was having them for the first time, these constantly renewing old thoughts, as if a place could magnify the emotions others had lodged in its very walls. Not unlike him she would say from her ground floor rooms looking out over the green-lawned gardens to the sea beyond, ‘the real life is set upon the ocean of life, a life house tipping its boughs into the swelling ocean.’
‘After I’d been shot down I knew I was alright’ said John, ‘but also that something was terribly wrong. My brother, hit the second before me, was down too, lying absolutely motionless, a pool of blood fanning out around his body. I didn’t know then that he was dead, but when I was heaved on to a stretcher too weak to cry out or wave my arms towards him, the stretcher bearer had shaken his head, ‘bullet through the heart. Yours went through your shoulder’, and I was borne off helplessly to a regimental aid post at the edge of the battlefield. Other wounded struggled alone. Some hobbled propped up by a mate. Could one have been my brother after all? I tried to raise my head to see. None was. In the shelter of the dressing station my shoulder was treated for the hole that had been left. No bullet had lodged. I was given an anti-tetanus injection and helpfully told I was in a mess.’
‘Tomorrow, my moving in day,’ Laurie had said, ‘would very soon be today. Happenings follow a wriggling pattern like a meandering stream whose route has already been etched out, events already subscribed to, occurring not chronologically but side by side, in parallel but not conjunction, time being the system which, forming a drop on the ceiling of the soul like saliva on the roof of the mouth, prevents everything from happening at once.
‘The night before today I dreamt I was leading the people of the city who’d shared my life for two decades on a tour that was to lead to my house upon the seashore sea-line’ she said. I would not lead them along the road that skirted it but down along the beach. They would walk the littoral pounded by the roar of the incoming waves, their forms outlined by the foaming white spume, the life that had sometimes resembled a dream now the dream’.
‘I couldn’t say whether it was an advantage to know hell on earth where nothing could get worse because I didn’t know then if I would return from it’, said John. ‘We’d forced ourselves forward through knee high mud. Beside us men were being blown to pieces. Pawns in a herd-minded forward assault we couldn’t pause to see who. We couldn’t hesitate. We couldn’t stop. We couldn’t run away. And either way, stay and fight or run for your life, one hit and we’d be dead. At night there was no respite from the torment. Hell was real. Inescapable. The images that wouldn’t go away belonged to my tortured consciousness alone. Always mine the identity I couldn’t let go of, a reality as trapping as war. Real too the unbearable tiredness of my body. The end of my brother. The frailty of flesh splattered sky high. The mess of many a body and every mind. The chaos with no redeeming, unifying principle.’
‘It doesn’t matter’ said Laurie ‘that I’ve not got to my house beside the sea before. I’ve been travelling for so long. Kuala Lumpa. Rama Pleasurama. Rajastan. Umba Lunka. Bexhill even. Places that lead inevitably down to the sea as surely as island to sea, earth to water, fire to air. But now I have and am, today, coming home. As if I’ve been here all my life, a ship crashing, cutting, cruising the breaking crests. But that’s isn’t all. All my life I’ve been here on the edge of the stunning swell, the wild and windy wet, the swaying, swelling trees where foxes run half seen, not just because of semi crepuscular light but because, as has been said, events happening in parallel worlds happen simultaneously, not in time. The lap of the eternal sea swell breaks eternally over stones. To live by the sea is to live eternally beside a little bit of what goes on forever.’
‘Despite being wracked with pain I was reassured just a little bit’, said John. ‘that just a little bit of a system existed in the face of the eternally unmanageable chaos on the Western Front. The ambulance took me to a casualty clearing behind the line. A train to a base hospital. A surgeon knew that my wound was damage to the brachial plexus, a network of nerves that conducted messages from the spinal cord through neck and shoulder to arm and hand. I just wanted the pain to end. I hardly heard that I needed surgery to repair blood vessel damage. But after I did hear the surgeon who reassured. I would not be one of the one in four who died of sub-clavian artery wounds. Nor would I be sent back to the Front to fight. The system looked ok to me from there and then.’
‘Between the suck and the wash of the trembling waves that quiver and break on the pebbled shore – is the silence’ said Laurie. ‘At night waves coming in at an angle from the east spray out like a fan of glittering teeth. When I woke from the first night in my house on the ocean of life I saw the sea there grey under the greyest of clouds, exotic. And every other morning too. In every weather.’
‘Often on the Eastern Front in the carnage of battlefields and the bewildered chaos of retreats, there was no system’ said the nurse who’d been in Serbia but now tended John at the mansion. ‘The wounded’, she said, ‘had arrived in bullock wagons with blood stained bandages that had never been changed – many had died on the way – and in a Serbian town lain in their uniforms just as they’d been found in the trenches. They swarmed with lice on floors of hospitals, hotels or shops on boards or little beds of straw with no blankets to keep them warm in the freezing Serbian nights.’
‘The winds beat outside’ said Laurie, ‘but inside a champagne, coral sandy like carpet is marked by shoe prints that can be swept away – not by the sea’s waves but a hoover sucking up dust and crumbs. The shoreline-shaped sweeps in its pile caused by flooding delight me. Here in this chameleon shimmer, this fine-sand softness under foot is reminder of life’s relish-able textures. Not the deep dark mud of Wilfred Owen’s trenches, but a cradling sea, flickering, glistening and stretching. You don’t need to avoid this sea like soldiers did the mud, and while you observe it a little bit of it could become a little bit of what you are, without you being drowned or shot.’
‘Hospitals and dressing stations were set up in disused barracks, schools, convents, railway stations, or in shattered towns and villages’ the nurse had said, ‘in ambulance trains, hospital ships, under canvas on hills, in valleys and lonely countryside. Often there were no surgeons like the one you had. Sometimes I and another nurse had to perform operations by ourselves’.
‘In case it’s escaped your attention’ Laurie wrote to Ess, ‘and I’m not sure how much attention you’ve left, I’m no longer in the city, but a stone’s throw away. It would be good if you could throw the stone and come down to this place. A woodpecker pecks for a worm in the lawn outside. A robin with wings whizzing like a humming bird’s hovers at the window with a mouthful of worm. A resident crow attacks a pigeon as if it were a worm trespassing on its property and its mouth bulges with pigeon quill and mottled grey white feathers.’
‘My wound’ had said John who was recovering, ‘will always cause an imbalance in the way I move. It has something to do with muscles or nerves damaged between shoulder and back that makes the torso lopsided. Meaning hereafter will be different for me. Not the pursuit of perfection through beauty or wealth, for I will never have the bodily grace I want now, nor the courage that went with it. The swiftness of my mind will carry me but it will be too strong for my body. It will not help when I fail before I reach the end and fall in a helpless heap.’
Ess would not respond with a full mouth, that is with words that were articulate, let alone come down to see her, Laurie knew, but she would say, ‘though these rooms are as big as the sea they are warm and dry, not cold and wet. It is civilised on the edge of this cliff with grand Victorian buildings, including a hotel literally called The Grand, whose windows in their uppermost parts peer out like lambent eyes from their roofs.’
‘But when the nurse, whose imagination is, I see, her body, comes into the room, everything seems to stand still’ said John. ‘She can imagine nothing beyond the circle cast by her body, going out before her like a torch down a dark lane, bringing one thing after another out of the darkness and into her dazzling ring of light. ‘Therefore’, she said when I told her this, ‘trauma is the blurring of light’’.
‘Yet on nights when the wind off the sea is cold and ebrasive’, Laurie continued to Ess, ‘the holm oak and sycamore which line the upper cliff are bent low, and the lush undergrowth of the undercliff offers the little protection of a half cultivated wilderness. Here it is obvious but has yet to come to be: how can anything offer protection when the whole endearing mass of us and what we as civilisation create, will be undermined by our inevitable demise, let alone our wars? Still, forgetting their temporality, the buildings and the hotels do just that. They are feigning, and laughing if buildings can, as we must too. Nor is there need to batter down these walls, this protection, this living behind curtains. The sea will if it wants. ’
‘Here John and I are protected, encapsulated in grand buildings’ thought the nurse, ‘but in the fighting out there across the sea the society we’ve built up, slowly, is threatened by destruction, destroying us anyway.’
‘It’s not just our temporality but the vulnerability of a gale battered land upon whose edge we sit with nothing but the sea and France between us and Spain that makes our sad reliance on the impossible resilience of matter laughable’, thought Laurie out loud almost a hundred years later.
‘I’ve been here long enough now to feel the privilege’ John repeated to the nurse, ‘that for all the life lived outside is also another, within, undamaged. And that that one outside image, the sea, can replace the one of the battlefield. And to be alive is to be immortal just for that moment of immortality, for ever.’