The Sea

How artists investigate the beauty and ferocity of the sea

Aug 23, 2022

waves of water — Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

I’ve always had a fearful respect for the sea. Growing up in New England, we would often go to beaches on the Atlantic Ocean. It was not the culture to truly swim there; with few exceptions, we merely dipped our toes or ran quickly in and out, unless we found ourselves, for example, on the calm side of Cape Cod on a very hot day. It was simply too cold. And…all of us had seen Jaws…shot on Martha’s Vineyard, the Kennedy-famous island just off Massachusetts.

The Matterhorn homepage

I probably saw Jaws when I was about 6 or 7, about the same time I was interested in moving deeper into the waves. Maybe it was too young to see it or maybe I would’ve been doomed with those horrific images to haunt me for life at any viewing age, especially considering the real (though infrequent) stories in the local news.

What a great film series. Of course, nobody wants to be eaten by a shark, and even though we know it’s really unlikely, many of us are afraid of this fate. National Geographic claims it’s because we’re afraid of losing control. I guess that’s true. But also: we’re afraid of what we don’t know. The shark attacks in Jaws are metaphors for our fear of the unknown and the miraculous power of nature.

In fact, we don’t even see the shark in Jaws until 21 minutes into the film. This clip above of the first attack doesn’t even show the shark; the invisibility is the fear, because the ocean represents the unknown. Sure, a Great White might pose a real problem if it’s swimming around near surfers or children kicking on floats. Though we know attacks are rare, the deepness and strangeness of the sea that envelopes these massive creatures is as fearful as the predator itself.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who was so affected by this film. In “Before and After Jaws: Changing Representations of Shark Attacks” (Australian Association for Maritime History, 2012), Beryl Francis explores the shifts in our understanding of sharks, especially great whites. He claims that the movie itself as well as changes in media reporting of attacks in response to the film created more fear but also led to more scientific research and general public knowledge about sharks.

I’m talking a lot about sharks when I meant to start talking about the sea. But how can we capture the beauty of the sea? It seems so clichéd; I guess I’m avoiding it for that reason. I’ll get back to this idea when we look at literature that engages with it. Film and painting can tackle this problem by just going for an aesthetic reflection without comment. But we can also look at the sea first by what we do on it, in it, and at its shores. What do you do at the sea? What do you think about?

For some reason, I keep thinking about the opening of Calvary (Ireland, 2014) and its gorgeous shots of the Irish coastline. Although the beauty of the waters enters the film several times, it also seems to mimic the turmoil and darkness in the protagonist-priest’s mind.

Interestingly, the opening shot of this film features…surfers! (They have nothing to do with the film directly.) There is something magical about the idea that individuals can tame the beast of the sea with just a small board, and I guess this is what the priest is trying to do with his inner conflict.

The reality of great white sharks in New England didn’t keep the surfers away, but most of us laymen stayed safer and warmer near shore. Even then, our parents taught us about dangers of riptides and fast changing currents. There seemed to be little good that could come from venturing into the water. But later, I lived in Hong Kong where the waves were decidedly smaller in the South China Sea, and the warm beaches were ubiquitous. I learned to swim in the sea. Shark nets helped ease my mind. And I felt a desire to try out surfing.

So I tried. In Bali, in Biarritz, in the Algarve. I not only learned how to surf (or at least ride a few in) but also how to swim with the waves. On a particularly rough day, my instructor saw me being battered by the waves. He made me dive under them, with board in tow, again and again and again. Somehow, I began to feel a harmony with the noisy waters that had woken me early in the morning, threatening my mortality.

I’m a terrible surfer, but I think I understand it at least a little now. There is a simultaneous (little) understanding that creates a feeling of control and a continuous susceptibility to the unknown movement of the tides. To learn more about these sensations and the beauty of the surf, I turned to literature rather than push myself through rough waves that, admittedly, I still find a little frightening. From the beach, I investigated these feelings.

Surfing beauty

Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life (2016) is a memoir by journalist William Finnegan about his obsession with the sport. It’s affected his life through friendships, family, and work in many ways and seems to be something like a religion for him. (You can read a recent article he wrote for The New Yorker on big wave surfer Kenny Lai.)

Although he often talks about the beauty of the waves and experience of surfing them, he also discusses some at Kelly’s Cove in California that were “not things of beauty, but they had guts, and if you could decode some of their eccentricities, they offered occasional pitching backdoor barrels.” He finds a greater purpose in the surf that he cannot escape even when it’s dangerous.

He discusses discomfort to find ideal surf conditions, such as the very cold winters at Ocean Beach where a “broken leash and a long swim could spell hypothermia”; it made the “passage of time feel distorted.” When we distort time, are we truly living? Have we escaped our mortality?

Finnegan’s winters in Madeira were especially frightening as a reader. Others would watch him and his friend surf the “serious wave”: “Heave, long-interval lines marched out of the west, bending around the headland into a breathtaking curve.” This watching as he watched the surfers long ago in Hawaii to learn how to do it shows the sport as performance but also show the distinction of being in the water or outside of it. There is safety on the side, and perspective. I think of other texts that are aware of performance, such as Macbeth or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?…is everything a performance, and if so, for whom? Shakespeare’s Macbeth says: “Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more” (V.v.19-28). Is it then, the fatalist or pessimist who pushes dangerous limits? Or is it the one who is truly living?

How we respond to fear can also be both performance and art. The friend calls the Paul do Mar a “picturesque, kamikaze close-out” but the author found it “mesmerizing.” The “not normal ocean behavior” reminds us that we can start to understand nature, but it can still surprise us with devastating effect. The author states: “I could tell, deep in my chest, that everything was wrong with these waves.” The act of surfing becomes a kind of hubris.

Although it was a near death experience, instead of his body reacting with nerves by “shaking,” he felt “fantastic.” He says he talked about going to church to feel “humbl[e].” We are insignificant and the waves don’t care if we live or die: we are simply there to witness them. What do you think of people who knowingly push the limits in this way – big wave surfers or free climbers? How has danger affected your view of the world?

Finnegan’s friend barely survives the dangerous waves, then makes a series of “semi-comic” drawings of it. Peter Spacek also uses surfboards to create art. Surf has inspired a lot of art in many genres. Other surf art murals attempt to bring experiences at sea to many passerby. In a way, these artists are immortalizing their experiences as well as trying to capture the feeling for the public who may not have the skills or guts to try it out.

Hokusai’s Great Wave

Before surfing, humans tackled waves for survival, either for economic benefit or by directly hunting fish and other sea creatures. Under the Wave off Kanagawa (The Great Wave) (ca. 1830-32) by Katsushika Hokusai is an iconic work. You can do a lot of reading about this painting, but it’s also important to just look. Often at museums I like to read about the art later when you can pick up one of those pamphlets or find a QR code. If we just encounter the painting first as colors and lines and depictions of a human vision of the world, we see something beautiful. How does the painting make you feel? Where would you place yourself in the painting? Which lines makes you want to enter it? What shapes mimic nature and which ones seem to defy it?

Although we tend to look first at the beauty of this wave itself as well as a distant Mount Fuji, an important element of Hokusai’s painting is the inclusion of the tiny-looking people on fishing boats. They are vulnerable like a surfing Finnegan in the unexpected waves he sometimes faced.

Besides this youtube.com video, another interesting article is from Gary Hickey: “The Old Man, Mount Fuji and the Sea”:

Depictions of waves and the movement of water in Chinese painting, which had a formative influence on Japanese depictions of the same styles, were found in the traditional genre of mountains-and-water, or sansui (Chinese, shan shui). …[T]he indigenous Japanese painting tradition known as yamato-e had utilised the power of waves to highlight human struggle. Hokusai’s numerous early depictions of the movement of water oscillated between such decorative fields of linear patterns and dramatic depictions in which animals and human figures are shown struggling against waves.…
[W]hat gave Hokusai the ultimate wave design in Thirty-six views of Mount Fuji [the sequence in which this painting was a part of] was a sense that drama was being played out in realistic space. It was Hokusai’s experiments with this design in a Western-style format that played the key role in this integration of realism, decorativeness and narrative.

I love the way he highlights this painting as an intertext of several different cultural influences made new. (Hokusai was conversely a strong influence in European Japonism, especially for Claude Monet.)

He later discusses how although the Edo Period in Japan was seen as largely closed to foreign influence; in part the isolation strategies of the rulers led to some like Hokusai to be even more interested in the outside world. Hokusai drew his influence from elsewhere, including ‘Western realism’ of the Dutch as well as architecture or manmade objects (the boats in this case).

Maybe understanding the avant-garde multicultural aspect of The Wave makes it clearer why there are so many reinventions of the image. For example, The British Museum’s blog highlights related street art and fashion.

The Environmental Humanities journal (Duke, 2016) highlights the way Hokusai’s painting has been used more recently in discourse about the Anthropocene (which will be a later topic of this newsletter). He investigates painted re-imaginings from the 21st century with the idea of human’s effect on the planet :

This explicit transport of Hokusai's wave into a conversation about embodiment and materiality sets up the life that Hokusai's wave has in today's catastrophe-conscious world. In the newest rescriptings of the Great Wave, there is much less of the contemplative and much more of the calamitous. The Wave has come to stand for imminent disaster—climatic and more—and operates as something of a call to arms.

The Sound of the Sea

Michael Cirigliano II of the Met Museum tells us that composer Claude Debussy was inspired by Hokusai’s work in his musical depiction of the sea: La Mer (France, 1905). The original recording included a cover with The Great Wave on the front. Music, like the art of impressionists, was also influenced in this way:

The aesthetic parallels between Hokusai and Debussy within their respective disciplines are many, as both artists chose style over realism and placed an intense focus on brilliant color and vibrant energy. Just as Japanese art of the Edo period prized decorative motives independent of system or conventional development, so did Debussy have distaste for formal structure, motivic development, and the use of strict musical forms that composers adhered to during the Classical and Romantic periods.

You can hear the literal sounds of the sea made into music as well, such as Lindsay Olsen’s Sounds in the Sea: the Art of Ocean Acoustics. She brings science and art together to make it accessible to all. Although she studies the ocean with scientists, it is also elusive: “The ocean is unimaginably vast…something we are accustomed to hearing in words but rarely experience firsthand. We have only explored a tiny fraction of the ocean.” The awesome nature of the sea is captured in the beauty of the music.

Several other artists using ocean sounds can be found here, with links to sound and film projects.

Cinema and the sea

How many romances or mysteries have we seen on the shores of the ocean? Here is a nice list of beach scenes. Less often are films actually out at sea; of course there is the pragmatic issue of shooting as well as the strangeness of spending extended time at sea that conversely makes it an interesting subject when it is tackled.

The ocean is a space of imagination as well as cultural conflict. These interpretations help us to understand it at its most basic level (without human geographical constraints), which is paradoxically vast and complicated. In exploring these ideas, we might look to two of my favorite postmodern philosophers—Deleuze and Foucault:

It likely is no coincidence that two of the works of geophilosophy most frequently cited by human geographers make reference to the ocean as a space of alternative sociospatial formations. In One Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1988) write, ''The sea is a smooth space par excellence,'' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988) while Michel Foucault (1986), in Of Other Spaces, writes, ''The ship is the heterotopia par excellence'' (Foucault, 1986: 22–27). In both cases, the allusions to the ocean as a space of alternate ordering are metaphorical, but, like all metaphors, they gain some of their power because they resonate with what is known about the material conditions of the entity being referenced.

Gilles Deleuze’s L’Image -Mouvement (Cinéma 1) is a great starting point for any cinema, but especially for the imaginative forces of the sea. L’image-pulsion is not a pulsation but an image of ‘force’ or a ‘driving action.’ (p. 174). These images in cinema do not capture the original reason for what we see as movement or action; for example, we cannot see hunger, but we can see the way a person reacts to hunger. He sees all these forces within the ‘great force toward death’ (“une grande pulsion de mort”); in other words, they are all forces of nature and forces of the mortal world.

To play with ideas like this in cinema, Deleuze proposes that filmmakers use ‘naturalism,’ that is, instead of ‘realism’ as a reflection of the world, they create ‘natural’ and plausible worlds where these drives can be explored. The sea is this world. As even marine biologists only have a narrow view of life in the ocean, we have to imagine a kind of ellipsis to suppose the forces of the sea. However, the sea’s force is strikingly different from humanity’s. Where we might seek power, love, sex, food…the sea simply is a force of nature. As far as we know, it seeks nothing other than to exist…to swell, to calm, to pull, to hold something up or sink it down…

And although there are shores, there is no true ‘beginning or end’ to the sea, just like Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the ‘rhizome’ in A Thousand Plateaus. (p. 1462) In discussing ‘old man river’ (and therefore metaphors of water), they discuss this idea of the intermezzo in relation to water. They posit the idea that American and British literature take up this in-between space as well, with no clear definitions, allowing them to move more freely in a dialogue. An idea of being “between things” as the location of idea formation and the foundation of life, such as “a stream without beginnings or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle.”

In other words, the middle is all. Perhaps the lack of physical definition within oceans other than changing shorelines allows it stand as a metaphor for all life as well as an individual’s life? It is chaotic by definition, creating a “subject that can no longer even dichotomize” (p. 1457).

Fear has no beginning or end…but love doesn’t either! In a Buddhist way, we can think of ourselves as energies in the universe…along with the ocean…what does this mean about our place in it? Particularly when it may be extremely chaotic, like this scene from Tom Hanks’ Greyhound (2020), where he was bringing men and supplies across the Atlantic from the US to the UK during WWII:

The endlessness of the attacks as well as the sea itself were mirrored in Hanks’ visage, showing both resolve and futility, both great leadership and humility. For he knew that although they could try their best, there were many factors that made imminent death possible. Back and forth….up and down…in a seemingly endless motion with hopes of eventual freedom. One cannot help but see the whole experience as a purgatory, but for what purpose? Is it simply the notion that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger?

Here the aggressor was below the sea if it were not the swells of the sea herself; the German Uboats invisibly preyed on their vessels, like we imagine the shark in Jaws. Although things are different on the ship, they need their leader more than ever, just as the lifeguard in Jaws takes the lead. Leadership in these situations doesn’t deny the possibility of death; instead it looks to attempt its avoidance with foresight as well as to console those who are the living.

Sometimes the fear is that we will fall in love in with the strange darkness of the sea, that we will want to dive into the unknown. The Shape of Water (Guillermo del Torro, 2017) goes in this direction. There’s so much going on here that I’ll leave you with it for now, and maybe come back to it from a different angle another week (feel free to make comments):

A literary ocean

What happens when you take away images of the sea and replace them with words? I am often afraid of cliché when describing the ocean as a fiction writer. How can we not be? We have all seen it before…and yet it does not cease to amaze us and is different every time, in every context, as we come to the shore or float atop the salt water in a different frame of mind.

Many poems dance through images of the ocean and use tides and waves as metaphors. This is not a bad list of poetry about the sea. One poem I love that takes place on a beach is Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (England, published in 1867, but written likely in 1851) Although a calm scene, it is one of great sadness with beautiful imagery like these lines from the first stanza:

Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

The pathetic fallacy of the sea reminds us that we are all connected. It reminds us that grief is everywhere and has been since humanity began; the next stanza compares the scene to the same that Sophocles would have experienced millennia ago.

But the salt water, like our own tears, is not only grating or stinging — it cleanses through its beauty. The sounds are therapeutic and remind us that life goes on. However, many interpret Arnold's poem as a fear of science taking over religion: “Religion (‘The Sea of Faith’) might have once provided protection to the Christian world, but is now feared to be in recession.” What have we lost in societal rejection of religion and what have we gained? Could someone who embraces Modernity still lament this loss of faith?

What strikes me about the poem, though, is that the experience in the vastness is remarkably solitary. Through the immensity of nature, we can feel very small…but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. By letting go of self-importance, we can feel oneness with nature and a calm humility. (Later, I’ll explore Gaston Bachelard’s concept of ‘intimate immensity’ through mountains, though you may be able to apply it here.)

However, you might also feel extreme fear if, for example, you are lost at sea or are battling a mysterious sea creature. The conflicts are with nature but also with the strength and fears within oneself.

Short takes

I’ll bombard you quickly with a few novels now, because I couldn’t pick just one or two, and I’m sure you’ll have loads more to add.

Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (USA/Cuba, 1952) investigates a man taking the challenge of reeling in a huge marlin, only to have it eaten by sharks.

Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea (UK, 1978) also features Hukosai’s painting on the first edition cover. Here the sea is also a place of seclusion for the main character.

Octavio Paz wrote the surrealist prose-poem / short story “My Life with the Wave” to show the tumultuous nature of love (Mexico, 1951)": “…she would stretch out in front of me, infinite as the horizon, until I too became horizon and silence. Full and sinuous, she would envelop me like music or some giant lips.” Whether you think of your own lover or of nature’s loving envelopment, it’s hard not to see great beauty in these words.

Virginia Woolf also takes us to the sea in several novels and short stories. The Waves (UK, 1931) is a novel about a group of young friends growing up and facing grief. The times of day in each chapter correspond with moments of their lives and are figuratively demonstrated by the sea.

There are italicized descriptions of the waves at the start of each chapter, as if mimicking the grief of the characters. Here are two examples:

The wind rose. The waves drummed on the shore, like turbaned warriors, like turbaned men with poisoned assegais who, whirling their arms on high, advance upon the feeding flocks, the white sheep. (pp. 47-8)

The waves broke and spread their waters swiftly over the shore. One after another they massed themselves and fell; the spray tossed itself back with the energy of their fall. The waves were steeped deep-blue save for a pattern of diamond-pointed light on their backs which rippled as the backs of great horses ripple with muscles as they move. The waves fell; withdrew and fell again, like the thud of a great beast stamping. (pp. 97-98)

And then the last line of the novel: The waves broke on the shore. (p. 199)

The once school friends both come together and separate as they are older in the way that tides move. They struggle against the futility of life – Rhoda kills herself, possibly by jumping into the sea off the cliff she looks over earlier. They seem to be at the mercy of fate in some ways, and in other ways ride the beauty of nature before them.

The waves will keep going after they die.

And then there’s Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), which also places us in solitude at the sea’s edges:

…the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts and seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat with the children the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, ‘I am guarding you—I am your support’, but at other times suddenly and unexpectedly, especially when her mind raised itself slightly from the task actually in hand, had no such kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life, made one think of the destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea, and warned her whose day had slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all ephemeral as a rainbow…

Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (India, 2008) is a strange and beautiful allegorical tale that has become part of many postcolonial syllabi. The sea is freedom from the characters’ hierarchies (“battled against boundaries of caste”) and the violence of the sea mimics the dangers of life at home (“the craft dropped behind a ridge of water and disappeared from view”).

Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (Canada, 2001 and film adaptation by Ang Lee, 2012) takes us through a spiritual, surreal journey through Piscine (Pi) who is lost at sea. Martel looks at the way we can overcome our fears: “I must say a word about fear. It is life’s only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life.” (p. 214) The ‘vastness’ of the sea is first frightening then awesome:

I awoke once during the night. I pushed the canopy aside and looked out. The moon was a sharply defined crescent and the sky was perfectly clear. The stars shone with such fierce, contained brilliance that is seemed absurd to call the night dark. The sea lay quietly, bathed in a shy, light-footed light, a dancing play of black and silver that extended without limits all about me. The volume of things was confounding—the volume of air above me, the volume of water around and beneath me. I was half-moved, half-terrified….Life is a peephole, a single tiny entry onto a vastness… (p. 236)

In Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (USA, 1851), chasing the whale is a lot like chasing the waves in Barbarian Days. It is a dangerous goal and one that emphasizes the limits of man vs. nature as well as the hubris that some people have about our ability to control nature. We see the collapse of normal social order that we do in Martel and Ghosh’s novels in Melville’s novels where a different hierarchy is in place and even the top is at the mercy of the sea (and its whales). But we will talk about whales next week!

I will leave you with one quote from Moby-Dick: Chapter 111 — The Pacific:

There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath; like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried Evangelist St. John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery prairies and Potters’ Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.

The sea unifies us; she reminds us of our smallness but also gives us beauty and solace. Danger and beauty, mortality and explosions of life’s energies…these edges of our understanding of our worlds seem embodied in the sea.

In the comments, please tell us about your relationship with the sea or other art that has interpreted its meaning for you. I’ve left the comments open to all in this first edition, so feel free to answer a question I pose here or ask your own.