The ocean braved on a recent, brief, attempted away-getting becomes the saving grace.  All else directs away, toward colors and lights and tastes that demand on all sides their absorption as luxury, as complementary to a vision of self as brilliant and constructed and golden and sharp.  The ocean clears that up, directs all back into the roots and birth soil of those same words, which, without that oceanic direction, were always still there, still clear in their spelling and powerful in this trust in them, but rootless, left hovering precariously above ground, barely tangible, barely graspable, desperately seeking for anything that could pass for its explicable roots before it gives up entirely and dissolves as it floats away into an ideo-sphere of lost convictions.  The ocean says, “Remember!” to add more words to this collection:  organic, green, awe-ful, “Remember!” fish, coral, sand, ....

To dive into it, finally, to get away from selling-selves that need too much energy to weather or manage, the charged eyes that look wrong through, the expert responses and hyper-sensitivity to each of even slightly-hinted at revelations or preferences, those blurred lightning bolts lurch as they defy. It is a bombardment of almost-humanities, almost-conversations, almost-Is.  But nothings.  So with unnecessary excuse, without towel, to the rocks and waves and primordial life below!

Nothing unexpected, nothing but tries, baby footprints of sand lead the way.  And then, just before passing the artificial limits of the swimmable cove, looking out, away from the beach and anti-origin, and towards history and future, Virginia Wolfe shows up, Edna Pontellier shows up, and with them the ocean as last grasp at redemption, or at least at remembering.  In this wet body, immense in all directions, cool and dense and dark and unending, powerful, one giant consciousness that is impartial to the small human--in this ocean is Justice, is a balance or at least an echo of this voice, is a justification of choices lived and life chosen, in these small 26 years, a giant, capital, crystal clear 'Yes,' 'You,' or 'We,' or maybe 'All,' something that made clear again that path to inward, which by now is recognizable but still always and too easily allowed to become overgrown with mosses of false colors and dead branches that look like arrows.  Wolfe and Pontellier returned finally to the water to seek themselves out one last time.  In this ocean, in this body, is the knowledge of that comfort too, again perhaps; In this ocean and body is the remembered I, is the forever-possibility of the horizon and the eternal ultimatum of the ocean's Justice.  And in this ocean-and-body too is the failure to live towards that I, and there is calmness in that clarity.

Ocean confirms, but how to confirm it, and confirm self?  These circles create whirlpools, and inside could be the overwhelming cumulation of all that's known to be unknown, maybe all that "needs" to be known "before any word or step into the world is justified."  In that case, voices will become mute, and they will choke by the hands that own hands, choke on their own swallowed but un-swallowable voices.  

It makes sense that writers and painters and sculptors might declare that the reason to write, paint, sculpt is in order to survive, in order to attain something again and again that is at the very least just more than the survival or denial of the majority of moments.  And yet, the choices made in between gleams of brilliance from these actions toward life (in between composition, conversation, creation) remain purely choices of survival.  Is there more comfort in muting?

In the ocean is the beginning of the vision of self:  a single arc, beginning with the right to love and the right to unbordered horizons, building to distinction and separation and the discovery of solitary footprints, and then perhaps crashing into the awe of learning the power of redefinition and of dissolving dichotomies. There is a terror and pain in this incomplete arc, of learning the beauty of being a conscious, self-aware, linguistic, single human heart and soul in the world that happens to exist for us, because of us, and in spite of us, now and before and long after.  But to begin to write one's own story is the site of that whirlpool, of paralysis and exclamation.  

Perhaps beginning with a stranger's story might help unlock the floodgates to the inner world of the I via words that declare and perform the All.

Dear Stranger,

Do you feel as seasick as I?  Do you know where you're going, with not no doubt whatsoever, but maybe with hope and confidence?  Are you still dreaming?  Does that dream still carry all around it the gleam of your core beauty and power ever more realized?  Just as it is now and brighter?  Has your dream image changed?  Has it died and been reborn?  In a familiar likeness or as something of a very different color?

Dear Friend,

Have you found a face, a voice, with whom to cherish your most raw cavernous cries?  Have you even discovered that need for such a face, such a voice that is yours but as if duplicated, doubled in secure power, other still so that you can see your image reflected in related eyes, and in that other you know you exist?

Do you, dear you, know what I mean?  If so, then maybe I can know too, because of you, that I exist.