The Sea: Time and the glim

1. Time and the glim
Notes on time, waves, road trips, hope and love.

Ocean Beach looking North

Moonset over harbour, Victoria, B.C.

These were things that tried a young man’s soul.  This one was quite small, about 36 inches, not even close to the required 48 inches for most good rides.  I was enclosed by the seawall’s indented panel pattern below the false horizon to the edge of what looked like the universe.  One afternoon, looking out across the sandy beach to the low tide flat I heard my mother’s voice call to look at the “dolphin” going by.  I saw a motorcycle passing by on the wet low tide flat.  Okay, that’s a “dolphin.”  Later, I again heard my mother’s voice announcing, probably to my father, look at the “duck.”  I hauled myself up and peered over the edge to the universe and saw the most peculiar vehicle, a large amphibious truck used for near shore research and termed a “dukw,” Okay, that was not a duck.

I was quickly learning, while pulling myself up by my fingers to get a glimpse of the infinity towards the ocean known by the sublime quality of it’s texture as the “glim,” that adults knew little of practical matters.  I hardly bothered to listen thereafter.  After all, I had a tricycle, more like a motorcycle than a dolphin, and ducks were all around the grounds in frequent visits to the zoo.  However, this philosophy nearly truncated my short existence when I was accused, tried, and symbolically expelled for violations of the attention rules shortly thereafter in school.

From ALONGSHORE

by John Stilgoe

Chapter 1 THE GLIM

"Late afternoon finds her standing at the very edge of the sea, waves just touching her toes, the rising onshore breeze lifting her hair, sunlight glowing against her skin and faded neon bikini. One of the locals, one of the women who bring no accessories to the edge of the world, stares seaward, watching something invisible to the summer people who walk behind her, bertween her back and the dunes. Now and then some inlander stops to follow her stare, focusing and refocusing on the immensity of waves beyond the surf, then gives up and strolls on, content to look a few yards ahead. Only other locals know that the woman watches vastness.

Vastness cheats watchers all slongshore, even locals. Proper vastness, dictionary vastness, lacks edges, stunning eye and numbing brain with boundary-less immensity, with infinite extension. Coastal vastness ends at the horizon, even on the clearest, most colorful, sunniest days that torment eye-shielding beachgoers scrutinizing what only seamen truly know, or feel. Sky and sea meet at the "horizon line," or so newcomers think as they remove sunglasses and squint, determined to see some limit, some line, marking the edge of infinity.

Ocean beaches front extraordinary vastness, opening on encompassed vistas that at first surprise, then unnerve, then bore and bore and bore. However many beachgoers watch swimmers or sailboats or even squint toward the lobsterboat or rare steamship far beyond, few watch the sea for long. To the uninitiated, a boatless sea is simply empty, a visual blankness that not only fails to reward sustained scrutiny but mocks the most experienced of landlubber observers.

How far away is the horizon, the "line" about which inlanders speak so certainly? Mariners and locals offer little immediate aid. At high tide on a clear day, the five-foot, three-inch-tall woman atanding with her toes just touching the water can see the top of something-- say the head of a swimmer-- floating on the surface of a calm sea roughly two and a half nautical miles before her. But that same woman can see the masthead of a sixteen-foot-high sailboat cruising much further off, slightly more than seven miles, in fact, and she can discern the topsails of a sailing vessel with hundred-foot-high masts far further, some thirteen and a half miles away. In perfect weather she might see the tip of an object-- the rim of a volcano-- 328 feet above sea level, almost twice as distant, twenty-three and a half miles beyond her toe-hold at the edge of land, and she cand see the top of an eight-thousand-foot-high mountain a hundred miles away, the last something that makes the feats of Odysseus and other classical navigators far easier to comprehend. Mount Ida in Crete is eight thousand feet high, a wonderful landmark for mariners in small boats, almost as wonderful as the clouds that hover two miles above Polynesian atools, the clouds understood by traditional Polynesian navigators as exclamation points in the kapesani lemetau, the speech of the sea remarked in canoes floating nearly at sea level."

“Nature is but an image

or imitation of wisdom,

the last thing of the

soul; nature being a

thing which doth only

do, but not know.” 

Plotinus

Time and the glim

Robert Hotten

2004

This conjecture

is about time entering my mind.

First I saw in early fall

waves from near the horizon,

each breaking on

and washing up the rocky shore

Thoughts other

than observation

of the waves.

Poetic expression

artistic borrowing

of words existing

to abstract

virtuality of nature

Time comes of the

sequence of bundles of imaginary

precepts as they transfer

wind/water

originate/break

flow/dissipate

forever