Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [10]
Miss Bishop’s marine creatures endure what no other mortals can; they seem more like spirits than living things. This other world was both clear and impenetrable, visible and unknowable. Although dozens of likable faces looked back at me, any one of which might almost have been his.
So began a chain of encounters with seals.
Seals are coastal creatures, citizens of two elements. Though most at ease in the water—where gravity’s unmoored and their bodies arc and tumble freely, somersaulting and floating on their sides, supported by the movement of just one flipper, the flick of a tail—they bring some of that undulance with them to land, on the rare occasions when one sees them out in the winter sun.
I have always associated seals with Wally, through a chain of private associations with the sort of complexity and irrationality that characterizes the way a poetic image twists together a clutch of meanings, fibers spun into a single, complex yarn, various in texture, glinting with strands of separate and intermingling color. Something in the handsome cast of his head, the depth and clarity of his brown eyes. f of Delibes, a ravishing duet from Lakmé called “Dôme Epais.” This aria is an invitation—one woman inviting another to stroll along an Indian river and pick jasmine—and it is pure fluidity, the unmistakable text of a kind of joy, the pleasure of swimming, of free movement, of floating in an untroubled suspension. Wally loved that music, and I imagine that in part this was because he was not, in his body, a comfortable swimmer, though he longed to be; in his spirit was a latent seal.
Seals bear a noticeable kinship to dogs, which Wally loved, and with which he felt a deep and immediate connection. “You like dogs,” a tea-leaf reader in a Boston tearoom once told him, “and dogs like you.”
I’ve just read an Inuit tale, which a friend has sent me, the story of a boy who left his parents behind to live with the seals, and in their camps at the bottom of the sea (where they gather around their fires!) heard their tales of ancient days and times to come.
And I’ve been thinking of Bishop’s seal, who floats, in her poem, in an element like knowledge, and likes to listen to her renditions of Baptist hymns.
And then there’s the notion of the seal as merman, of the creature which embodies the two worlds, unlike us, who live firmly in one medium, despite our brief visits to the other. To be of the coast, a mer-being, is to partake of the liminal, that watery zone of possibility where one thing becomes another, where the rules of one world are suspended as we enter into the next. The coast is the shifting zone of change and transformation. A coast is not a line really but a borderland, site of a continual conversation between elements which transforms both.
Movements between the worlds are limited, and often extraordinary. This is Ludovico Guicciardini, writing in Description of all the Lowlands, a seventeenth-century guide to Holland:
They also claim that, around the year 1526, a merman was taken in the Frisian sea, formed in every way like the rest of us; they say that he had a beard, hair on his head and other hairs that we have, but quite setulose (that is, resembling the bristles of a pig), and harsh, and that they accustomed him to eating bread and other ordinary foods; they say that in the beginning the man was very wild, but that later he became gentle, though not totally tame, and he was mute. He lived for several years and finally, having once escaped the same illness, died of the plague in the year 1531.
Travelers between worlds are mute; they cannot tell us what they know. The language of the other element is untranslatable, though here it seems that, accustomed to solid ground, the mer-creature is also susceptible to its epidemics.
The wounded seal is young and startlingly silvery in the February sun. Its injury is a small bloody line along the tip of one side of the graceful little tail, as if perhaps it’s been bitten; it doesn’t look terribly serious, but of course I don’t know how to read their pain, their