Body trouble

My first experiences being at the sea made me realize that I become
seasick just by looking at the waves.
There is a practical difficulty inherent in inhabiting the ocean.

Also, in my case, I am subject to seasickness. So I really have to watch out what I eat when I’m at sea

→ On the one hand, we are made of water. → But then water can also kill you in this sense, if it blocks your lungs and you cannot breathe.

E.R.B. Salt water as I experience it in relation to my body. I want to focus on 3 main things: First, the fact that you cannot drink it. And when you do drink it by accident, you choke. Also, you cannot really drink it because when you do, it makes you thirstier than before you drank it. So you will dehydrate at the end of the process.

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.

There’s a dependency on it, from its power and immensity. There is a thing there that does something in the stomach. There’s also a very strong connection between the ocean
and colonization. Because, you see Portugal has a very long coast. The ocean is a very big resource.

Everything is falling – the moment of encounter with it is linked to the possibility of death. When I’m next to the ocean, I feel like I am just part of it. I don’t have to organize anything. I sense a hollow feeling in my stomach.

At Byron Bay (in Australia), there is one beach where people drown regularly. I’d often experience a dull pain in my kidneys just before entering the ocean there. Later I found out that this type of pain comes exclusively from fear.

During my first year in art school, I spent three weeks on an ocean cruise with my mother and sisters. There was a major breakout of the flu throughout the ship and variations of the same flu circulated around the ship so that I was constantly ill with a different range of symptoms during the entire cruise. The ship literally became, for me anyway, like Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead and which was by chance, a book I found in the ship's library. I read it locked up in my cabin only going out when we docked on a new island, and where I would stumble around with a horrible fever too weak to actually know what to do and where to go.

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.