Words and images

Last week we spent a couple of days at the beach. Not that this was part of my recovering from surgery; we just wanted to spend time at the beach before the Summer ended. As it turned out this beach provided something of a—dare I call it?—spiritual experience. But I might also call it an existential one.

Our first walk along the seashore took us over a rocky headland. When viewed in a certain way, in a certain light, this seascape became an alien landscape. Alien mountain ranges, canyons, plains, indeterminate heights, depths and distances. A landscape forged by erosion; a monochrome landscape. Was this the primordial Earth? Was this a planet out beyond the galaxy?

What was my role in this landscape? A (quantum) viewer giving life to the landscape? An integral part, each of us fulfilling a symbiotic relationship with the other? A maker of transient footprints, granted a snapped vision of the longevity of the non-organic and a fleeting glimpse of my irrelevance to its continuity?

Next morning we walked along the beach—away from the headland—empty of human life. We were in our own worlds, Margaret and I. She looked for pretty coloured shells and other organic detritus cast out of the everlasting waters. I listened to the crashing of the waves tens of metres out beyond the waves attempting to wet my feet. And I watched the light from the early morning sun as it played across the water, the waves and the beach.

Suddenly, I was transported to that alien planet I had discovered the previous day. But this time I imagined myself to be the alien, visiting this wondrous scene for the first time, feeling its beauty, its agelessness and its emptiness. These thoughts I wanted to share with Margaret but to speak—to utter sound—seemed sacrilegious. (It took some time for me to find an appropriate word for the experience.) For our beach had become a temple, a nursery of new life, a place of restfulness in a universe of harsh creation. An accident upon which I was happily meandering.

No image could capture that feeling; no words what I felt. Like the waves, my thoughts and feelings rose, peaked and collapsed, suffusing through my being. Awe, reverence, wonder. Then it was all gone. Words reappeared; the moment passed. Yet the beach—side lit by the rising sun—remained, unchanged and unaffected by my fleeting moments of wonder and magic.

People eventually returned to the beach, each to participate in their own way in the co-mingling of organic and inorganic.

We here in Australia tend to huddle in settlements constructed on or around beaches. For us they are resources to use and abuse as we choose. They give us pleasure, social opportunities, moments of reflection, relaxation, an opportunity to indulge our primal hunter instinct or to make money. Too often we take these wonders for granted; they become a simple backdrop against which we consume our lives and resources. On them we mark out a private place, claiming temporary ownership. Then the waves return and obliterate our intrusion onto the timelessness and alienness of beaches.

I do wonder who is the alien in this landscape.