Joy Cowley - Navigation

The sea is always there. Sometimes, in dreams, it rises up against the windows of my house, a great blue-green wall, shining, translucent, wordlessly familiar. I press against the glass, filled with longing, yet am unable to find the way out to it. Always in these dreams, the house is an alien thing, fractured by the density of furniture, each item named corner of table, chair, stereo speakers, cup and plate, window frame whereas the sea that sings outside knows no separation. It is all of a liquid oneness and it is the place of belonging.

The call is not so strong in waking hours. We all live with language that divides creation by possessing it with names. Words are the tools of my craft and years of practice have brought skill so that there is very little gap between the intention and the result on paper. Writers learn the shape and weight of words, how they react with each other, how to lace them together to give information not implicit in their literal meaning.

We manipulate language so that the mind works one way and the senses another. We can pare sentences into splinters so fine that they enter visceral organs without pain and the reader only detects their presence much later.

Yet now, increasingly, words answer the tidal call. Names of things press against the glass of the house, striving to reach the point where language disappears. Separation longs for oneness. I sit at the computer with words at my command, only to have them run wild in their own formation, so that they end up racing together like a flock of lemmings down a hill and into the sea.

My father, Peter Summers, could not live at a distance from the sea. He talked of his childhood in a tenement house in Wharf Road, Ayr, Scotland. He was the third of six children, the one who met the fishing boats, helping to unload the catch in return for a few herring or mackerel tucked inside his shirt for the family evening meal. He was a clever, lively child so attracted to the sea that his passion would have become his occupation had he been stronger, but the only time he lived on the sea was with his family on the voyage to New Zealand in 1926. Rheumatic fever left him delicate and all his later voyaging was done in books: Norse galleys, clipper ships, colliers, pirate boats, submarines, World War II destroyers these were his vehicles, and he didnt mind which seafaring story we chose for him from the library. When his wrists and fingers were so inflamed they had to be strapped to boards to prevent movement, my sisters and I used to turn the pages for him. But as soon as he was well enough, hed be down to the beach, fishing, collecting firewood, his mind filling up with dreams he could never fulfil.

His family came to New Zealand in error. My grandmother thought these islands were part of Australia and said she expected to see kangaroos hopping along the wharf. There was no money to move further than Auckland, much less to Australia, so my grandfather took pick and shovel work, helping build the Point Chevalier road, while my grandmother concerned herself with Peter, who had another bout of rheumatic fever. I have a sepia photo of Dad at sixteen in a hospital bed. It was thought he would not live the night, and my grandfather ran through the town to find a photographer who could record the boys last living moments.

In fact, my father lived another forty years.

Eventually the migrant family moved to Levin, where my father, at twenty, met a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl, Cassia Gedge, whose mental state was as precarious as his physical health. They married, and moved into a cottage on a poultry farm in Roslyn Road where my father worked for a while. And in 1936, after a long labour, a daughter came feet-first into the world.

We begin life in the sea. Before birth, we swim like little fish in our personal ocean and we are not surprised to learn that the amniotic fluid surrounding babies has the same salt content as the sea. As children we have scooped tears on our tongue, licked a cut finger, and we have tasted crashing waves. This, like any other truth, does not come as surprise but recognition of a knowing already in us.

The sea continues to speak to me of a greater reality beyond the daily mental processing. It is metaphor for the awareness that is in every cell of the body, and it insists on the interconnectedness of everything. Always the sea whispers about the universe we would experience if we could escape from the limitations of our five senses; it tells us that beyond these senses, life and death are the same. For all of its dark depths, the sea represents light. I am drawn to that light and to that other metaphor, the one that takes my longing to the window of this bodily prison. The sea represents more love than I could ever hope to hold.