sea changes

 

A great deal of MFK Fisher's collective writing is devoted to sea change. Indeed her autobiographical work (The Gastronomical Me) casts those words over whole periods of her life without the use of details or qualifiers. Part of this, I suspect, is because she is traveling both with her husband and with death and two such companions must make a mess of time. Sea change then, is not just about crossing space and time through water, but about the way troubled times lump and mass themselves: squeezing the meaning out of language and  reminding us that wide water often kills detail.

"...We were ghosts, then. Our lives as normal living humans had ended in the winter, in Delaware, with           Chexbres' illness. And when we got word that we should go back to our old home in Switzerland and save what we could before war started, we went not so much for salvage, because possessions had no meaning any more to us, but because we were helpless to do anything else. We returned to the life that had been so real like fog, or smoke, caught in a current of air. We were very live ghosts, and drank and ate and saw and felt and made love better then ever before, with an intensity that seemed to detach us utterly from life. Everywhere there was a little of that feeling; the only difference was that we wree safely dead, and all the other people, that summer, were laughing and singing and drinking wine in a kind of catalepsy, or like a cancerous patient made happy with a magic combination of opiate before going into the operating theatre. We had finished with all that business, and they had it still to go through..."

(The Flaw, 1939. (The Gastronomical Me.) The Art of Eating, by MFK Fisher.)

While there is no sea voyage in my own future I do feel that the visual cues of autumn's descending will similarly blur detail leaving me with that same wavering feeling of beginning a new way, slow and watery. Not for any tactile reason, no concrete loss, life change, solid event. Rather just the sense of continuing in the natural world. I feel this way when the ground gets soft before getting very hard.