Boats

→ I guess this experience made me feel empathy for people crossing the sea to come to Europe. It made me understand that the ocean is not a kind entity if you are not well prepared for it. If you fall from the boat in the middle of nowhere you are probably going to die there. Now that I know this I can empathize more with other perspectives on this.

E.R.B. I don’t remember it consciously but – I don’t know how to say it. If the water enters the body... When I was at the hospital they were taking all the water out of my lungs. If the water gets inside the lungs – the body doesn’t work anymore → its like with boats. With air → you are surrounded by it and there is a flow. It flows in and out of your body easily. But with water there is no flow: the water has to remain outside, otherwise the system doesn’t work. Its like with the law of thermodynamics → there is always the necessity of a barrier between systems.

L.J. On the boats I concentrated on what was happening around me, also because there were people around. I mostly get the stories when I’m by myself and in the water up to the knees. Cold water, preferably.

Recently I went on two sailing voyages on the North Sea from Ostende. It was with my partner’s parents who have a small yacht and they took us out for a few hours to drift on the sea in the sweltering summer heat. This was only the second time I’d ever been on such a boat and it was really a fantastic experience. Like being in a Paul Klee painting, the shape and the motion of the sails and all the other elements that go into being pushed along by the wind seem so simple yet are also so fascinatingly rich and poetic.

I always travel from Naples to Palermo on the ferry when I can. This is an absolutely fantastic voyage and one that Raymond Roussel made to his sad Sicilian end. Leaving Naples, heading towards Palermo, or returning from Palermo to Naples, this voyage evokes a great wealth of associations and anticipatory thoughts that ferment and bubble away during the overnight sea journey.

Around the Fiji islands, I travelled to many parts of the archipelago by small motor boat or canoe. Sometimes the water is so deep, that it’s bottomless. As one floats in such bottomless waters the sun shines on the body + all the while, your shadow disappears into the endless depths. This is quite an ontological and richly animated experience and beyond description once again.

Then, when I was living in Istanbul → I saw a dolphin from the boat while crossing from the Asian side to the European side.

I remember taking the mailboat from here to Dover with my mother. We used to take it every year. For shopping. The journey is about four hours each way. It was my mother’s idea of going to England. We would only go if sea was calm, of course. Before the trip, my father would look out of the window in the early morning to assess the weather.

I spent some time in the Shetland Islands in Scotland. To get from mainland Shetland to Fair Isle you either take a boat, which is called The Good Shepherd, or a plane. I became very seasick when I took that boat. That was strange because the water was calm. The waves crush the cliffs all the time so there’s an almost invisible current.