I Want to Live in a Lighthouse
This headline is kind of a trick. Alt: Romancing the Sea Stone.
Some days I dream of being a retired ship captain. I’ve never read Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea but I imagine it’s an elegiac about a retired old salt who spends his time living in an old lighthouse looking out over the ocean. The book is probably more about other things, mainly giving critics the change to use the “muscular prose” for example, but I’ll stick with what my mind conjures up.
It’s important to keep in mind while reading this that I don’t want to actually be ship captain. I want to be a retired ship captain. I’ve learned enough about sailing, even modern day sailing to know that it sucks. Anything bigger than like a four-person motorboat is just too much work. I’m also not great with rigid hierarchies. Sirens are not calling me to the froth and the wave. A sailor’s life is not for me.
No what interests me more is the littoral areas. Where the salt-ridden waters of the ocean lap up against land. The shore, rocky or otherwise. Lighthouses on outcroppings in remote areas of Maine where an aging captain might retire. It is a Romantic interest. Not in that I want to fuck the ocean, but capital R romantic, in the way of Lord Byron, Keats, or Shelley. An interest in the sublime, the supernatural, and powers of imagination. Littoral areas are ripe for all three of those areas.
Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation trilogy captures the sublime, supernatural imagination of the littoral perfectly. While he blocked me on Twitter a while ago, I have managed to set aside whatever petty grievance he may have against me and maintain an appreciation for these books. They tell the story of people trying to figure out what is happening in Area X, a location on some American coast. In the movie, I think they made the location Mississippi, but in the books the setting remains unsaid. VanderMeer, while also telling a story of betrayal, alien invasion, and corporate espionage, manages to convey the dark danger of the coast. As he writes in Authority, the second of the trilogy:
“God, but the coast here was painfully beautiful, the dark lush greens of the fir trees piercing his brain, the half-raging sky and sea, the surge of salt water against the rocks twinned to the urgent wash of blood through his arteries as he waited for her to kill him or hear him out. Seditious thoughts: there would be nothing too terrible about dying out here, about becoming part of all of this.”
The mixing of pain, beauty, and death sums up the littoral. Tidal pools, beaches, rocky shores, are all beautiful in their own ways. Lush, stark, intimidating, apply whichever adjective is most fitting. This beauty masks, or at least attempts to mask, the death and pain that come with the littoral. Beaches function as sandy hells for large creatures that find themselves washed ashore. Places where the dead and rotten get washed up, tossed unwanted and misused upon the ground by the ocean. Tidal pools, teeming with life, are fragile ecosystems, where disturbances of even the smallest amount can mean certain death. Generations of life wiped away with the whim of a schoolboy or the wroth of a storm. Rocky shores may be beautiful on postcards and in person, the white froth of waves crashing against sharp spires of stone, wet with spray. But in these rocks too hides death and pain. A slip of the ankle can mean catastrophic injury, or death. An overlarge wave can carry someone into the riptide never too be seen again until thrown up onto some other beach in some other part of the world.
This mixing of pain, beauty, and death is a ripe place for Romantic obsessions with imagination and the supernatural. It takes a very dull mind indeed to look out over the ocean and not try to imagine the worlds that exist beneath its grey-green waves. Hell, even the most basic of children’s beach activities, building sandcastles, is about building new worlds. The littoral is ripe for imagine. I don’t know enough about Lacan, or Freud, or Jung, to speak knowledgeably about cultural archetypes or whatever, but something about the coast calls to a lot of people.
The fluid nature of the littoral regions has a lot to do with this I believe. The very nature of the coast makes it something that is entirely unknowable. The tides, controlled by the Moon, an honest-to-God celestial body, of all things, are beyond are reach. We may know when high and low tide will be, but predicting the height, duration, and power of each wave is impossible. Neither can we control the coastline. Erosion, storms, human activity all lead to constant short- and long-term changes. It is physically impossible to even measure the coastline of a place like the United States. Any number you’ll find is an approximation. There exists a paradox when measuring something like a coastline. Even if you could somehow freeze the coastline in place, stopping the waves that change the outline of a beach with every crash, you still couldn’t measure it accurately. Because the coast is not a straight line, but full of fractals, jutting and turning each and every way, the more precisely you try to measure it, the less helpful a number it is. Measuring each twist and turn of the coastline, if you were able to do such a thing, would result in a number so unfathomably large as to make no sense. Here’s a Wikipedia article about it if you don’t believe me.
The littoral is an area constantly in transition. This certainly appeals to me during our current political climate and health crisis. Outside of that as well, I’ve always had a bit of an anti-Enlightenment streak in me. A belief that some things are unknowable, and best left that way. I’ve never understood the drive to categorize, label, and mark everything that moves. The littoral is a region that resists that.
I’ll end this with another quote from Jeff VanderMeer, this time from Acceptance, the final novel in the trilogy. “In other words, we must distrust the rational, the logical, the sane, in an attempt to reach for something higher, for something more worthy.”
Wow, Dylan, one of your very best I think, and that’s saying something. The humor is there of course, but also prose of beauty and power. Thanks!