North Atlantic

The North Atlantic is a bristling beast, a churning torrent throwing up sloshes of brine settling in keen eddies breaking in on themselves, vast white crested waves bedding down in the unseen deep set against the cloaked pewter sky of rolled interlocking clouds closing in and down on the water onto the tops of the waves.

I am waiting for my moment but it never comes up. Everything is just talking, only storm fronts and waves. Everything is profoundly talk. There is no relenting. I realise that you are going to talk, come what may, and that you are going to say what you have always said and needed to say and that I cannot hold back the swell of these waves.

Everything is just talking and there is nothing that I can wait for, need hold out for. There is no salvation in a moment’s coming. Finally I see there is no place to pin my hopes onto, that I must contend with what’s now.

You are going to say what you’ll say and I am going to submit. You are saying it even now and they are listening with intent. This space is clean, it’s got its fair share of polish, it’s fair share of the well-kempt. I know they know I’m listening and submitting and that’s all part of this devilish game. I know the eyes are on me. I’m quaking and wailing and suffocating and dying but above all I’m just a faint whimper I make sure no one hears. But then they all see and hear as I nod my head as I deflect, as I roll, as I submit. I cannot hold back the ocean or whatever it is, this great white onrushing mess. This ineffable blotch of unending spray.

The ocean is backing up again against itself churning in and out. It sometimes settles and the motions and eddies lay back and relent, and they are very much under the surface but the sky is still withering and totally shot and active, staggeringly active.

It is wet wet everywhere. I have to wait until you have said the next thing you want to say, and there is no let up in your will, in what you want to say and need to say to release it. This is your power then, your display of your limited human power. This is how we show and come by it. This, my friends, is where all dreams are made. What it culminates in. Talking. Promising. Prognostication. We’re all some sort of big shot. The world they hauled you into and there is nothing more, not a jot more.

I am not supposed to say anything much according to the ocean, the North Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of our own shores off the west coast of Ireland.

Everything is just talk and water, everything comes down to this feeling to nothing else. How they will look up and agree. How there is always just four of us - you me, us and them. How once this is done I realise there is nothing, and all the time I thought there was anything was such a tragic and shabby waste of time as if there could ever be any justification for your ridiculous talking to try to make us whole, to sustain us, a sort of secondary sustaining yet more important than the first, all set against the whites of the waves and the sea, all a subversion and lie and deceit because all there is and can ever be is our flat futile talking.

To the backdrop of the ocean is this pointless chatter, always washed out but in the hope to be kept dry. How could I have thought there was anything different, anything more? How can there ever be? Why am I mute in the face of the sea? Why is it the biggest deceit? What can the ocean do but just swallow and consume you? You will go down whole. You will go down alone, but you won’t be cut up into pieces, thankfully.

We are stuck here us four but maybe you don’t realise. All stuck in the face of the sea. We are a mess of unobserved feelings, never shared or known. Feelings that come from talking, from the noise of your mouth from its randomness, its smooth conversation, from the unformed, from nothing remotely necessary or cast and although it is just talking, there is always a right and a wrong thing to say in the face of this sea. I am falling into the maelstrom, I want to be sucked under. We talk to say the right thing always. To deny the wrong thing always. The denial is implicit in the saying of the thing we have said. And though the talking passes, as the talking passes, there is nothing in it, it is a breeze on the sea, a sound across the surface hardly breathing, hardly touching and the swell churns and the sea sprays and the sky broods and the people die, that’s if they have not already long since passed away.

How can the sea control our feelings? How can we just talk? How on earth can we think that we can merely talk in the face of the great foam of the North Atlantic sea? It is disgusting, it is insolent. It is tragic and it’s a horrible lie. I am stuck but we are all stuck too thinking that it will go some place, lead somewhere, but this is just chairs around a table in this well-kempt room — this will not go anywhere but here — it began here, it will end here and talking will decide — it always does — talking will be the judge and produce whatever it needs to produce for this short period of time.

And there is nothing to think I need to hold on to protect myself from the sea because the sea is always the backdrop and we have fallen into it, you me and they or whoever it really is, but I wonder how it can divide us this sea and I wonder how we ever thought that talking could suffice — could there not be anything more fulfilling than just scant and bare crumbs — could we not devise something of true force set against the great sea? Because talking is just the barest of starts and it doesn’t last for even a second, and it recedes, it already has receded, whilst the sea just obviously doesn’t relent.