The Blunderbuss

Try standing on a cliff overlooking the sea. If you can’t get hold of a cliff, go down to the beach, or spit, or whatever land’s end you can find.

Now look as far as you can. We know some things about the sea before us. We know it is wet to touch, salty to taste and that all manner of things can drown in it. We know about the pull of the tides and the action of waves and the wind on the shore. Perhaps we know about the moon and currents – some warm, some cold. All these – the physics of water, the graph of winds, the scale of channels, gives us ideas. Nice rational ideas about geography and horizons, about distances to and from. We imagine ourselves at a fixed point, where land meets sea. We watch waves break and feel grounded, secure in the knowledge that the world is being brought to us. Everything is incoming.

But let us pretend that we do not possess this knowledge or these ideas. Let us imagine that we have come quite unexpectedly on open water, perhaps for the first time in our lives. Might we then question what is fixed and what is not?

Next time you are there – on that cliff or by that shore, leaning on some old seagull-stain – try collecting the land at your back, be it Brighton or Britain, and all that lies therein. Gather the streets and buildings, the brick and glass and clay. Gather the fields and cattle, the woods and the hilltops and say ‘Forward!’ You will see that the waves no longer break on land but on bows. You will feel this island move beneath your feet and slip from its shelf, sliding from the old mooring out into the ocean’s green. The pier no longer withstands the coming storm but goes to meet it, rolling forward, the proud bowsprit of 10 million acres and more. Your shoreline is not an apron for floods but a moving hull, cutting the waterline with its edge. We need not feel stationary by the sea. We can travel as we stand – there is no more waiting for the world to be washed up. Let the nation roll on over the deep and never mind the sea-sick. The only anchor is in your head. 

Mausoleums stand, the size of shopping malls, concrete mounds for a thousand common dynasties. The motorways mown between are pockmarked with the angry divits of grieving mourners, blown like Kleenex down corridors of grief. Night and day, they process past the great domes of demise, fat with the bodies of their own blood and the shared artery of buried wars. The screwed up faces of the destitute mirror the crushed tissues in their wet pockets – inscrutable, closed, condemned. Finally, the avenue of mausoleums forks, as if two deviant moles had parted ways acrimoniously, continuing their regular eruptions on stubborn new maps, forging an underground necropolis of split seams. In the tongue between these divergent courses other grave markers rise, a field of skyscraper crosses, towering records of the dear departed.

Stepping off the broad avenues of the cemetery paths and wandering into their marble spores, the mourner is lost amongst endless inscription, as if the shorthand of humankind has finally been transcribed in its entirety - the unstoppable typewriter of a global secretary laid to rest by the dismembered corpse of her soldier groom. 

Yukio was utterly still and yet every aspect of his face, every muscle of his limbs, seemed poised on the verge of a violent animation. Sitting in front of this folded figure, I felt as a hapless jelly, paralysed on a plastic tide-line, stranded before an immense and static wave. The room, which contained Yukio and cornered me, seemed to collapse into a stark and timeless equation of predator and prey. The mock decorum of our human status, our clothes, our chairs, our rank hair gel, only intensified the bestial urges in both – for my part to run, to scream, to distract, for Yukio, a simple desire to preside.

Manhood inverted, goose pimples galore. Green feet gone numb in scottish sand. Wind in every orifice and salt in the eyes. Open and exposed, no modesty for miles. Treading the rock – painful passage to the water. Spiked limpets, urchin infested pools, killer crabs. Slipping on seaweed and landing knees up on granite. Cursing my balance while clasping my crotch. Shins barnacled, rubbing rare.

Getting to the edge. Standing seaward, last lonely man in the west, shaking uncontrollably, automatic teeth – a statue to stupidity. Looking into the water. Staring at depths. Dark masses moving, swaying weeds in strong currents, foreign movement on submarine sand. Wanting to dive clear, make the channel, miss cloying forests and floating tendrils. Slipping again. Not ready! Legs plunge, elbows catch on rock, finger nails claw. Half submerged, skin in shock - things are moving underwater.