Stories appear

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.

And something happens to me every time I am close to water. I see it and feel drawn to it. I walk to it and enter it and start walking through the water. Inside the water my creativity explodes. I start making up a story in my head. Mostly I’m speaking it to myself while I’m making it. I am imagining this story in the moment. It’s like meditating I guess. I walk through the water and I feel the water flowing between my legs – and its like I’m in a trance.

M.M. How do stories appear?

There’s the ocean of Melville’s Moby Dick and the sea in the story At The Bay by Katherine Mansfield. One is an oceanic and gigantic yarn full of fury and intensity and the other, a very stripped back story as fragile and as nuanced as can be. These two quite different literary works exemplify the different kind of connections I’ve had with these two watery worlds. When I mention the ocean I am also thinking about the sea and visa versa, and I hope the differences, but also connections, between these two entities are not overlooked.

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”.

I’m an ocean baby really, as I spent the first part of my life beside the sea in suburban Australia. Mansfield’s story At the Bay connects to lots of what I remember about living beside the sea as a child. I recommend you read it and pay special attention to the way that Mansfield uses various speech styles and manners (especially by children) to evoke the spell that the sea and nature has over the diverse characters in the story.

There is a hippie colony near this beach and I once saw a naked woman park her baby in a stroller on the beach right in front of huge breaking waves. Then she went into the wild surf with the incredible undertow, leaving the baby to watch unattended. The view from the baby’s perspective must have been profoundly impressible and primordial, witnessing her mother disappearing into the massive waves with all the sounds of the breaking waves and wind raging around her. I was the only other person on the beach which was many kilometers long.

One of the most amazing things that happened to me on Fair Isle was the following: I was standing on a cliff (it was not dangerous.) I had binoculars and was looking through them at birds all around me. Suddenly, I had the feeling that I could touch the birds because I could not see the land through the binoculars, it was covered by the black edges of the viewers.

I have discovered different ways of opening my mind. For example, I read the Daily Telegraph. It’s not the best newspaper if you need information. But it has the best short stories. The best reports on the weird + the wonderful. So when I work on something, I cut out different things from the Daily Telegraph + glue it in a book → this works better for me.