I am one of those annoying white girls who can never decide what colour her eyes are. Filling out the form for my Canadian passport this summer, my father has to double check, once more, if they’re blue or green. We opt for blue, which I think is right. Green to me speaks of solidity, a rainforest bursting into vibrant, verdant life, spring in the plane trees outside my childhood home, measuring the year’s passing with their opacity. Green is the heft of a rough hewn cup of matcha, the leathery skin of a snake plant, or ‘mother in law’s tongue’. Green is stable, seasonal, certain in its flourishing.
Blue is something else altogether. Blue is an in-between colour, a somewhere else colour. Blue is the sky, the sea, so definite in their permanence yet subject to such continual fluctuations, the unstable changes which gently rock or threaten to capsize the ship of the everyday. The blue sky you see from an airplane is not the blue you see from the ground nor from the ocean; the sea at sunrise and sunset seethes with different shades. It is Homer’s ‘wine-dark’ expanse, it beats its metronome throughout Virginia Woolf’s sea-soaked novels. In To The Lighthouse, it is both ‘measured and soothing tattoo’ and a ‘ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat[ing] the measure of life’. It is sometimes sirens and harsh rocks and Scylla and Charboydis and sometimes it is an otter in a David Attenborough program, floating gently through fields of bulbous kelp. In Plato’s famous formulation of political authority, the state is a ship on a storm tossed sea, its appropriate captain the man who can read it a course through the stars. The sea rises, it floods, it heats to a boil.
The sea is real, healing, dangerous, yet above all the stuff of metaphors. It is a skein of bluish silk; it slips between our fingers. The sea threatens our realities; I feel, sometimes, on entering it, that each lodestone of my being has turned to foam or jelly, become insubstantial.
Following an incident as a child, I failed to learn to swim until I hit fourteen. I spent most of my compulsory school swimming sessions cowering at the shallow end, terrified to put my head under water and unable to complete a single lap of the pool. Perhaps that’s why the sea has always compelled me; I know how easily it could dissolve me. I want to let myself go, relax my tensed muscles and allow the tide to sweep me out towards the cerulean horizon, the thin band of gold encircling the world. Absolution in absorption as my body bled into the salt. Swimming in early July at Culatra Beach in Portugal, I can’t quite let go. The current is too strong to drift backwards with my eyes closed and the sun on my stomach. Besides, my boyfriend keeps trying to splash me, which makes it hard to maintain my fantasies of dissolution.
Back in the UK, the Canadian passport is taking its time to come, which is worrying, given I fly out in a fortnight. I now can’t enter the country without it, this sign of allegiance to a country my father calls his homeland, a country he has never lived in for longer than a month. He, and by extension we, weave threads of loyalty across several oceans, lakes and landmasses small islands on the way. Canada, England, Scotland, Switzerland, Austria, perhaps others further back. At parties people will tell my father his accent sounds a little Irish, as if seeking a landmass somewhere between Canada and Britain and Europe. He can do a good Scots, especially when reminiscing, but people are surprised when he mentions his lack of a British passport. From him I’ve picked up a distanced, sceptical view of Britain and a few vocal inflections that seem to come from nowhere.
This is the first time I’ve flown out to Canada. Normally, we travel with my father by liner — a fact that usually elicits at least one raised eyebrow. He hasn’t flown in decades, several early near-misses too pertinent a reminder that a thin layer of metal is not much to separate you from the atmosphere beyond. Flying is both unreal and all too real. Whole continents turn to Lego as the map on the back of your seat comes alive before your eyes. You cross over borders and landmarks, peer down through the clouds at forests and lakes, cities and mountain ranges, dusted with snow. At sea, all of that vanishes. The world is not small, but awesome in its largeness, its scale. You watch the sun rise and set, drenching the sea crimson, gaze out at the train tracks of foam the boat leaves in its wake. Sometimes, at night, shipping containers and other cruise ships flash warnings through the gloom, or the whalesong of a fog horn echoes sombrely. Port and starboard lights harmonise, the land recedes. Sometimes there’s nothing but water, water, everywhere.
In mid-July, before my father leaves, I hand him a dog-eared, pencil-marked copy of Annie Ernaux’s The Years, which interweaves individual and collective memory from the period 1941-2006.1 I wonder how he, only a decade or so younger than Ernaux, yet at the same time distanced from her recollections by his gender, will receive it. One day his and then my memories will one day slide into unconsciousness and collective forgetting, joining ocean liners and the sputtering start of the jet age at the bottom of memory’s deep sea — that ‘time where we will never be again’. These days, everyone seems to be obsessed with genealogy yet not memory, names not people the reduction of history to surnames and dates, discovered via at-home DNA tests and ancestry websites. Branching lines of reconstructed family trees like a network of mycelium rooting us in time.
My grandfather, who I barely knew, harboured a long obsession with ley lines. This is one of the few things I know about him, bar his name and the misshapen nose that ties me to him and to my father. Supposedly ancient and mystical lines of sacred energy which cross the world, connecting major landmarks and monuments, ley lines suggest our deeply human desire to be part of the story, to find a message in the flashing of lights across the sea. Maps and not landscapes; a global narrative which can be mapped from one’s study, a bird’s eye view. None of the detail of the everyday life.
There is a history of my paternal family, written on a typewriter and interspersed with photos and pencilled in comments. I haven’t yet read it, though it’s rested on the desk of my childhood bedroom several times. I don’t know why, I’m interested in history, in my family. Perhaps I’m scared to see where I came from — the silky blue ties which bind me to the world, the lines tracking and criss crossing and fraying and breaking. Not the rigid Roman roads of the ley lines or the structured sprawl of a family tree, but something more like a river, un-contained by maps. Perhaps it is easier to believe only in the moment, and your dissolution in it. To pretend that you can be both one with the story and outside it, a perspective which is really only available to God.
Perspective, which adds depth or its illusion to art, is said to have been ‘discovered’ by the Italian artists and architects of the quattrocento as they turned from religious subjects to the study of classical masters. Suddenly, representations could become realistic, so realistic you could imagine yourself stepping across the paint’s oil-slick divide and into the world of the art, to walk on water. But in a way, the accuracy of linear perspective tells a lie. Medieval church paintings pictured Christ, his mother, the saints, as the largest figures in the foreground of an image, to elevate their importance, their grandeur. The larger the figure, the greater their role in the divine plan, a style with sometimes humorous results, especially when compared to the classical, proportioned grandeur of their Renaissance successors. In some sense, this earlier mode of perspective is how humans actually see the world — the protagonists enlarged, the rest of reality reduced to backdrop for our own tiny stories. In The Years Ernaux imagines her life mapped on a graph of ‘two intersecting lines: one horizontal, which charts everything that has happened to her, everything she's seen or heard at every instant, and the other vertical, with only a few images clinging to it, spiraling down into darkness.’ Memory makes a lie of linearity.2
In early July my boyfriend and I visit the Algarve; we take towels and a parasol from our white washed hotel, where tiled courtyards open up to a calico roof, rippling in the sea breeze so sun dapples through into the fountain below. If it rains? It rarely does. Culatra Beach is quiet, it’s a Thursday and Portuguese schools haven’t yet broken up. Watching the sea, those million shades of blue again, the sun dancing like fish scales, as if skimming the surface of the water are a thousand greedy paparazzi, bulbs popping as they attempt to capture something just below our view. I imagine colour-matching my iris to the waves. I’m wearing blue also, a bikini I bought because it reminded me of a Hockney, tan body beneath artificial blue, beneath true blue, beneath paint. Perspective distorted. It’s a bit 2020, but it makes me think of a raspberry ripple ice cream tinted cerulean, printed on cheap plastic and polyester. I would be camouflaged if I drifted off into the Atlantic tide. This is the image I will remember when I look back on this day, the twin of another image, four years earlier, star-fished in the turquoise water off Stavros Bay in Greece.
There is a particular blue pigment used to tint the Virgin Mary’s robes; brighter than indigo, richer than cornflower. It is the colour of the sky in those fleeting seconds after the sun has dipped below the horizon, when a plane takes off at dusk, the colour of the heavens. Medieval and Renaissance artists saw this expensive pigment as sacred, and often juxtaposed it to inlaid gems or gold leaf, the Virgin’s halo a star crowning the blue expanse of her body.
At the beach, I take off my glasses. The expanse of sea with its myriad blues becomes flat, a wall of shade and sound, like a Rothko painting. Above the ocean’s gradient of turquoise, a panel of paler baby blue, the sky; below, the sand rimmed with white froth. Furthest from the sand, the same deep blue as the Virgin’s robes. I’ve always hated my short-sightedness, my reliance on expensive technology to see beyond the end of my nose, but right now it feels a blessing. I have, like hawks and hounds, an extra, secret sight. Humans aren’t meant to see the world this way. But I can access something special which others can’t: my eyesight untethers me from the modern world, the invisible web of everyday relations which controls our every motion. When I remove my glasses even the ancient, powerful ocean becomes nothing more than colour, shape, and sound, an archaic form. I am united with the past. Before me is the collapse of meaning, of relevance, of reference. Perspective folds in on itself, the world becomes a book of paper cutouts, tucked away. Jamais vu — the familiar becomes, for a moment, earth-shaking in its unfamiliarity.
In Rachel Cusk’s Outline, which I read in Portugal, the narrator goes swimming off a boat in Greece with a man she has met on the plane over. He is thrice divorced, she has just ended her marriage, has sons who are growing up and changing. Their companionable solitude in the cove is interrupted only by another boat: mother and father, sons playing in the water, a crying baby they must all still to hush. Water changes the perspective, puts a divide between them yet draws them closer together. The narrator thinks of Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff and Cathy staring through a window at the family scene beyond. ‘When I looked at the family on the boat, I saw a vision of what I no longer had: I saw something, in other words, that wasn’t there. Those people were living in their moment, and though I could see it I could no more return to that moment than I could walk across the water that separated us.’ To live in the moment or to look back, to dive in or pause, waiting, like Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, forever poised on the edge of ‘an exquisite suspense, such as might stay a diver before plunging while the sea darkens and brightens beneath him’. Mrs Dalloway, who sees others through windows, and over railings, and through water, and it’s undercurrent: time.
Water is as nebulous and tricky as time is. Water is a blue window, a window made blue by something — by what? Blue is an artist’s colour. It is also a liar’s. See Proteus diving — now an eel, now a dolphin, now and then again a man.
My grandfather was also colour-blind, though I don’t know what he thought of this, nor how he coped. For men of his generation – the ‘lost generation’ – the question of coping might not even have come into it. How did he see the world? Red and green colliding, the lights on a Christmas tree flung askew? How did he see the ocean, the many times he crossed it? Did he read the ley lines like straight and certain arrows in the dark?
How do we really know who is colour blind and who isn’t, when everything we see is filtered through the subjective lens of a pair of human eyes? How do we know that linear perspective is the truth, that blue is really blue? The sea and the sky are just filters, glasses to capture the ineffable in. There is no sea blue, no sky blue, there are only varying degrees of depth and light, colours on canvas. Woolf knew this: Lily Briscoe, in To The Lighthouse, tries to translate an endless well of reality into colour and shade; Mrs Dalloway skims the surface of a memory like a water boat-man across the meniscus of a lake. Ernaux’s images again, ‘spiraling down into darkness.’
This is my refrain: I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.
Last time I visited Canada, I came down with flu on the boat over. I slipped sideways off a treadmill in a swell, feeling feverish, and spent the rest of the journey watching dolphins from the deck, sprayed with salt like an ailing heroine in a Victorian novel. Reality wavered, I became untethered. A week later, recovered, my father and I woke up with the sun, canoed out into the dark, loamy lakes of Algonquin Park. There were lillies just coming into bloom; they reminded us of Narnia. Fish brushed by the flaking green paint of our canoe. The world held us in its clutches, the sea seemed far away. We were looking for moose, we were out for two hours and saw herons, loons, the flick of an otter’s wet tail, a beaver’s dam snoozing in the Sunday sun. Still no moose, the air began to chill. We paused for a while to watch a woodpecker hammering a love-song into the trunk of a tree, its unseen mate calling back in turn. Then we had to leave. I turned to manoeuvre the canoe around, sliced clumsily through the water with my blade.
Perhaps five metres behind us were two moose, a mother and her young. They were watching us, expressions of amusement on their faces. The grey-blue stone of the water rippled, darkening their reflections.
They had been there all along. If we had not turned, if we had not noticed? They still would have been there, just behind us, watching on.
I found Ernaux’s work through
’s essay ‘thanks for the memories’, which I can’t recommend enough for its intimate and perceptive analysis. It’s nice to be reassured I’m not the only ‘compulsive memorialiser’ out there.I wrote about childhood and the circularity of memory in an earlier essay: