sworn to lucidity: haar... (photos + poem)

I took all of the following photos one early morning in late May this year after a night of insomnia and heightened anxiety. The haar, the thick fog that rolls in off the North Sea, was permeating the 4:30am world as I went for a walk because I was claustrophobic inside, and too panic-y to be still.

I walked down my street, over Broad Hill and down to the ocean, which I could not even see until I was right there, the tide high, waves reaching out for me. I heard a pair of ravens, distant starlings, the usual chorus of a hundred gulls, but otherwise it was only water, footsteps on sand and grit.

I am not a morning person; I am most alert and alive and creative in the hours between 7pm and 2am. Thoroughly an owl, not a lark. Often morning itself brings me terrible anxiety. But there was something so new and calming about this morning, empty of humans but for me, and the vast whiteness, of the sky and sea mixing their substances, rolling themselves out over the land.

It felt like the very beginning of the world, and I was watching the land forming, as waves were receding, surging, shaping the shore. Gulls emerged, spectral. Sun burning a hole in the thick fabric, the limitless haar breathing and spreading, bringing life to everything. It felt so deeply calming, as if I could see everything as it was. Just tidal ebb, tidal flow. Simple, all the materials of the earth laid out before me.

A wonder, to remember this is all we are made out of, that we all crawled up out of the sea, this sea-mind that dreamt us, assembled us, connected every atom of us. It calms me, to remember that this is all we are.

haar

every morning the sea remembers

how the world began: there was

something it couldn’t touch with

the wet tendrils of its cerebrum, so it

reached out, cracked swirling and white

spilling from a grey heron’s egg.

every morning the sea becomes

the exhale of the sun on the ocean,

burns a breath-hole in the haar

that flows amongst the scatterings

of earth, befalls the land with its

thousand tiny fingerings in the folds

of every wave, recreates a memory

of how our lives began: a rolling

of broken mica, shell and stones

moulded together in the materializing

hands of the waves. on the shore, we

cobble ourselves together,

& every morning go forth

out of this, shapeless & nameless,

collecting our parts:

ii)

first, your lungs grown of knotted wrack

and rockweed, black tang of the first breathing.

the sea turns in you, thrown with the heave of the wave,

find your limbs hanging on a drifted tree.

now crawl out of this, make gestures like waking.

mouthful of air and water, the same substance,

like a heartbeat’s double voice, &

in your blood & spit the world is singing:

once you were this, & never only this

so move landward, quietly creeping:

the ghost crab’s memoried carapace,

the smeared flesh of a jellyfish

and the curved foreleg of a lamb’s quiet remains,

wool on the bones blowing in the wind.

iii)

does it frighten you, that

this is all there is?

a sea-sky & the land that

became of them, indifferent

to your meanings, to fervent belief.

does it frighten you, that

there is nothing to hold to?

out of the fog the waves stretch

and crumble in succession, a

never-ending grasping at the shore.

does it frighten you, that

there will never be any stillness?

it is all false, & we are in this. the

sea knows there is no horizon, no

heaven hidden past the soulka:

only ever-shifting rolling of the swell.

* soulka - in the Orkneys, esp. the island of Sanday, this refers to the ocean horizon, in particular where one starts to see the curvature of the earth