Mythologies

E.R.B. The ocean is closely related to death.The experience of death is very present in the ocean. That’s why there exist so many mythologies of the ocean. I think of death not always as something negative. I see it more as a transformation. After death, something else can emerge. It is part of a cycle. It happens in nature all the time and we also experience it in our lives. You let parts of yourself die so that you can evolve and adapt.

G.V.The ocean is more mythological than the sea. When I think of the ocean → I think of the Atlantic. For me, the Atlantic is very clearly defined: it begins on the coast of France + ends at the coast of the US.

A friend told me a story about a YouTube video. Apparently, there is a pregnant woman + old man that both enter into the water. The woman then comes out without the baby + then, much later, the man comes out with the baby in his arms. It’s like a mythological story.

Fantasies about the ocean are timeless – let me recall just one from 500 years ago, and that’s from Francois Rabelais The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Throughout this book, there’s mention of many sea voyages to strange and far-flung islands. For instance, in the last part of the book during one such a sea voyage, the ships crew were, I quote: “Feasting and speechifying and telling nice little stories, Pantagruel suddenly jumped to his feet and took a look around him. ‘Can you hear something comrades?’ he asked. ‘I seem to hear people talking in the air. But I can’t see anything. Listen”.

At Half Moon Bay near where I lived in Melbourne as a kid, there’s a sunken battle ship (a relic from WW1). One can either swim or walk to the ship depending on the level of the tide. The ship is called the ‘Cerberus’ and is the name of the mythological dog that protects the doors of the underworld. This half sunken wreck protrudes from the sea and its presence connects in my memory to so many strange sea fantasies I’ve read in poetry and literature over the years, including the sea voyages described by Rabelais.

The first experimental films I made were made on the beach in my early teens with my parents Super 8 equipment. One film depicted a friend coming out of the sea dressed in a bed sheet as a toga and reading a book. Later on, I filmed a pig's head being thrown towards the sea off a high cliff. I also would film the sand and driftwood constructions that I made on the beach. These rather crude filmic efforts were, in a sense, a sort of mythic homage to the sea and the stories that surrounded it.

I have a nephew who’s really into surfing and at 14 years of age, he saved the life of a father and his daughter who were being pulled out to sea by the undertow. And who would of very likely drowned had my nephew not brought them to shore on his surfboard. This heroic and mythological deed made the front page of the local newspaper.