There is hardly a way to talk about the sea that doesn’t slip into cliché. One of my favourites – if not the favourite – is this paragraph from Luce Irigaray’s The Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche (p. 47):
The sea shines with a myriad eyes. And none is given any privilege. Even here and now she undoes all perspective. Countless and shifting and merging her depths. And her allure is an icy shroud for the point of view.
No rapture, no peril, is greater than that of the sea. And the man has still to come who will live that love out beyond the reach of any port. Letting go of his rock, his ship, his island, and even of that last drop of oil on the water, and all so that he can feel the intoxication of such vastness.
It also reminds me of a story from one of my favourite childhood films – The Big Blue (Le Grand Bleu) – about what it takes to meet a mermaid:
(Jacques): Do you now how it is – do you know what you’re supposed to do, to meet a mermaid? (…) You go down to the bottom of the sea, where the water isn’t even blue anymore, where the sky is only a memory, and you float there, in the silence. And you stay there, and you decide that you’ll die for them. Only then do they start coming out. They come, and they greet you, and they judge the love you have for them. If it’s sincere, if it’s pure, they’ll be with you, and take you away forever.
In my existence on land, I take some photos.
Jana Bacevic 