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The Sea Has a Million Faces

This essay was written as an introduction to the anthology Upon These Shores, a collection of poems and lyrics related to the ocean from authors I admire. I highly recommend reading through the poems, as they touch on many of the themes of this essay! [LINK THE COLLECTION HERE]

“Though I have left her as oft-time before
O, how I long for her Maritime shores
I am but one of a thousand of lore
O, how I long for her Maritime shores”

The sea can be seen from almost anywhere on Rhodes, a small Mediterranean island just off the coast of Turkey. Even at its furthest inland points in the central valleys, one has only to climb halfway up the mountains before that great blue expanse comes back into sight. Its presence is inescapable.

Growing up on Rhodes, I developed a deep and singular connection to the Aegean Sea. In many ways it shaped my inner world – the calmness I felt as I lay upon its sandy shores in the night-time, my endless curiosity and wonderment as I snorkelled its depths, determined to find the strange, alien creatures that surely lay just beneath the next batch of rocks. I remember red buoys cordoning off the deeper waters at every major beach, their message loud and clear: “The sea beyond belongs to strong currents and ships. Swim no further - it is not for you.”

I kept going, obviously. The first time I did has become one of my most significant and powerful childhood memories – I can recall vividly the visceral terror of passing that boundary, the knowledge that I’d left the safe waters we swimmers were restricted to and truly placed myself at the mercy of the sea. And there, a new side to the object of my fascination was revealed: its terrifying immensity. It was only then I truly understood the scale of a sea, that the distance I’d travelled was as a grain of sand in its span. The water stretches far beyond the horizon, beyond even the horizon’s horizon - cast adrift out there, you might spend weeks afloat without ever seeing land. Or you might wash up on the shores of Egypt or Israel, lands so far-flung that to my young mind they may as well have been mythical.

In reality, of course, the waters beyond that boundary are much the same as the ones before it, and there’s no sudden transition of calm and safe to dangerous and horrifying. But even knowing that, I still feel something visceral when I cross the buoy line and stare into the abyss beyond – “it was anything but infinite,” Douglas Adams once wrote, “it was just very very very big, so big that it gave the impression of infinity far better than infinity itself.” And I think that’s what I’m seeing when I gaze out into the endless blue, the reason my terror is and will always be so potent. The sea gives shape to infinity.

“These shores have seen the rise and fall of kings
Like the rise and fall of the tide.
They had been here long before I was born
And they’ll be here when I die.”

What I didn’t fully grasp, growing up, was that my experiences with the sea were in no way uniquely Rhodian, or indeed Greek. That there were other islands and shorelines scattered across a whole planet, where people I would never meet looked out towards the pelagial horizon, feeling those selfsame fears and wonders. Different names and different waters, yes. But the same sea.

My family moved away from Rhodes when I was ten, and our new inland home was so far from the sea that it became impossible to justify making the trip. And yet, even as the Aegean turned from a daily presence in my life to a yearly one, I still felt a residual bond with and unerring respect for the waters of our world, one I’m now certain I’ll carry forever. The sea marked me, as I now know it marks every islander and shore-dweller born and raised in its clutches; from the sailors for whom it represents new, unseen worlds to the artists who make the expanse a canvas on which they can paint their emotions.

Upon These Shores is an anthology dedicated to the latter group, an exploration of the myriad emotions the sea has wrought in us for millennia untold, the varying gazes we’ve cast upon it and the endlessly diverse peoples and cultures for whom it has become a cornerstone of life. It will travel the world’s seas in search of poetry, from the briny shores of the Canadian maritime to the Coromandel coast of India, from the frozen heaths of Kalevala to the Māori moana nui a Kiwa, uncovering how our perspectives on the ocean have changed with time and place – and how they have inevitably stayed the same.

“In one drop of water are revealed all the secrets of the oceans.”

We often think of the sea as a great divide, a creator of irrevocable separations – and, really, who could blame us? Millenia of our history see a world neatly bisected, our Afro-Eurasian “Old World” and the Americas operating independently, completely unaware of each other’s existence. Poets often gravitate towards that propensity for division when invoking the thalassic in their work; in At Sea we see Bliss Carmen draw upon the experience of a sailor, his physical distance from land compounding the metaphorical distance separating them from the familiarity of home, the warmth of a lover. What better way to convey loneliness than to detail that vast, featureless nothing stretching to the horizon, in which one ship might well be the only trace of humanity within a thousand miles?

While Heaven Wept are, in my eyes, one of few artists whose music truly captures the breadth and scale of an ocean – their thundering guitars roil like tumultuous waves, while quiet, whimsical piano segments evoke the solitude of sailing across calm waters. On Vessel, they subvert Carmen’s idea of distance as despair, instead foregrounding a fantastical sense of boundlessness and wonder; references are made to “finding our peace somewhere across the seas” and the song’s refrain explicitly calls for the protagonist’s lover to “sail away, with open arms and eyes ablaze”. This journey will separate them from everyone and everything they have ever known, but why should that give rise to despair? Here it represents hope, an opportunity to find freedom and new beginnings.

So the sea can divide - equally important, though, is its ability to unify. Countless collective identities, from tribal to national, have been built on a peoples’ relationship with the waves. This shines through most clearly in the writings of Sarojini Naidu: A political activist first and poet second, most of her writing occurred during the height of 19th-century Indian independence movements and so many of her works unsurprisingly exhibit a heavy-handed nationalist streak. Coromandel Fishers sees her use the sea to appeal to the national pride of the native Adivasi, invoking their centuries-long bond with and intimate knowledge of their local nature to incite reclamation of their land. Kalevala and The Spirit Land exist in similar spaces; their respective cultures both arise from locations where water shapes life, and its influence is reflected heavily in their respective mythologies (Finnish folk hero Väinämöinen is fathered by the sea while sea atua Tangaroa is a major figure in Māori legend). In all three cases, the sea represents a unity of experience and a connection between all who live by its rules, and each has become emblematic of their culture’s endurance beneath oppression.

“Earth is floating like an island on these waters
Hanging from four rawhide ropes
Fastened at the top of the Sacred four directions”

One particularly windy day, my family made the two-hour drive down to Rhodes’ southern tip. I remember running into the biggest waves I’d ever seen, letting them carry me up then throw me back down onto the sand. I didn’t notice how far up the beach I’d been swept until I saw it – a point at the shoreline’s centre where the waters converged, physically dragging sand and foam behind them as they surged back out to the sea. My first time seeing a riptide. My first understanding of the true power of the currents I’d heard so much about.

Still as it may seem on a calm day, the sea possesses the potential to level cities and cause apocalyptic destruction to countless lives - and to some, this horrific might is its appeal. When Emirati poet Nujoom al-Ghanem writes of waters rising to swallow her people and homeland whole, it feels less like a conscious metaphor and more like a natural extension to her depiction of war; growing up in Dubai, a city just a few metres above sea level in a country prone to devastating floods, it’s easy to see how that image might have stuck with her.

“By the healing waters
Of my lovely shore
I laid
The air so bleak
So cold.”

Constantine Cavafy is a poet I feel particularly close to within this collection – not only was his life framed by the beaches of the Mediterranean like my own, he also writes in my native language. Cavafy grew up in a Greek-speaking community in Egypt, and from Θάλασσα του Πρωιού (Morning Sea) I can unearth many of my own attitudes towards the sea. The poem is as brief as it is effective – it’s a small taste of salty breeze on a morning walk, a split-second impulse to stay and watch the waves for a few seconds. Morning Sea revels in inconsequence. It exists as a snapshot of a single moment in a single lifetime in a single city in a truly unfathomable world, a moment much like many that came before and many that will come after. Yet it’s given significance - we readers are invited to share it, to stop and smell the meltemi winds at the narrator’s side. The experience is mundane to anyone who has lived upon these shores. Cavafy asks whether that makes it any less special.

This poem fascinates me. It’s fundamentally unlike any other in this anthology, a brazen rejection of all that, to me, makes the sea worth writing about. These are immense oceans considered untraversable for most of history, takers of countless brave souls, impressions of the infinite. We’ve seen other poets use them to convey the darkest depths of grief and misery, wrest metaphors for war from their cataclysmic power. We’ve seen nations built from them. To Cavafy? Inconsequential.

“And the rivers of underthought flow to the sea
Through deltas to oceans, lakes and estuaries
From any of their seven billion sources
The latticework of human experience”

Earlier, I described the sea as a canvas, a surface upon which an artist can express absolutely anything. Nothing illustrates this better than the simple existence of The Shake Prayer in the same space as Morning Sea. Erikson’s piece is everything Cavafy’s is not: a work steeped in scale, taking advantage of the unfathomable size of an ocean by using it to convey the equally incomprehensible scope of history. The shore becomes a metaphor for a peoples’ collective identity and traditions – implacable and enduring from moment to moment and day to day, but ultimately always washed away in the tide that is history. The poem’s last line is especially haunting; following a sweeping view of the inevitable patterns that we as humans fall into, our perspective is wrenched skyward, a final reminder that in the eye of the world, our greatest achievements are as a swimmer to an ocean. That even in a time when mankind has forced the earth itself to serve its will, the sea does not dream of you. And this last call for humility, to me, cuts to the very heart of what the seas symbolise, what about them has captivated us enough to produce the endless variety of art we can enjoy today. And that is why I choose Erikson’s words to leave you with.