RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR
Page 36
I have no idea. In the ocean, all this is happening, all the time, as it always did.
Suddenly, our Mexican whale, who knows no borders, breaks right off our bow, rolling in the waves with another whale. I’d been sure that there was a second animal in the area; I could feel it. Our whale turns on his side, as the two males join together for a while in greeting, or some other intimate exchange.
He is the first whale of winter; his song will summon all the others to the bay. Later he will compete with other males for the favour of a mate. Fins armed with barnacles will tear like ferocious weapons; tubercles will be sliced off rostra in the mêlée. The female, much larger, will swim on regardless, until she has made her selection.
All this has been going on for millions of years. As we watch the males meet and part, Isabel, my guide, observes that whales have lived through many changes of climate while ancient storms broke over their heads. A whale bears witness to the past and the future because it so exceeds our own little lives. Whales live in another history that takes scant account of our own, predating and postdating us as they may do, spouting their frothed defiance to the skies. How can we presume to take a photograph of a whale, to capture the image of another species? I am the alien in their world. I’m what was left behind.
Here in my room, overlooking the ocean, I flop onto my bed, too excited to move, too dumb to speak, caught between day and night, between water and sky. Frigate birds fly by. All I can do is lie there in the heat, aligned to the sea outside and the fever inside of me, feeling my heart beat, staring at the ceiling. The rest of the day, landbound and lonely, is impossible to bear. After all this time they still have the power to unnerve me. Won’t they ever leave me alone?
As the evening falls, somewhere out there he is still singing, if he ever stopped, a barnacled angel, bending sound. He sounds like me as I sigh in bed, unconsciously bemoaning my physical existence; as if I’d laboured too long in this body, weary of dragging my bones around in this gravity, and might reach out a flipper to turn myself over, sleepily twisted with oozy weeds.
Perhaps I could just let go of the world above – such a slight transition – and allow myself to fall, swaying gently from side to side, a last little dance before becoming something rich and strange. There we would lie in the cosy darkness, back in the never-ending night where I could hide and shelter, where no one could get at us ever again.
Back in my Cape attic, another storm rages, racking and rocking in the winter light, turning day into night. It cannot be defeated. It is brutal and beautiful, battering at the windows and tearing at the deck, fit to rip off every plank and tip me into the sea. It will not cease. It does not care. It blows and rains all day. I try to get in the water, but it picks me up and throws me out again, along with all the wrack and ruin.
I listen to the whale again, a long and low lament, dredging the ocean. And I wake hours later, in the dark, to hear the news.
I go out and walk the beach, waiting for the stars to fall. I can’t do anything. Down the coast – I imagine – he lay in a white room, wondering if that was the way to go. It feels as though I came here by appointment, as if I’d written it down in my blue notebook, forty years ago. Everything falling away.
A single star shines in the morning sky. The window is a black mirror. I watch him on my black screen, seeing my face in his, an anchor drawn on his powdered cheek like a sailor from Amsterdam. I feel the energy pass through me like a discharged current. What does it take to feel that way, all over again? The feel of satin on my skin. Your eyes, at the centre of it all.
Dennis and Dory and I walk the winter dunes. The moss crumples under my feet. The sandhills go on forever. Dory shivers for me. She follows, wide-eyed, as I walk on my own, the third beside us, down to the shore. I sing out loud to the ocean and scratch his name in the sand. The waves soon wash it away.
Dory stands there, watching, as I take off my clothes and swim, like a dolphin, in the freezing sea.
… We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
The Tempest, Act IV, Scene One
Image: Mick Rock, 1972
CREDITS
Editor: Nicholas Pearson. Copy editor: Robert Lacey. Text design & layout: Richard Marston. Line illustrations: Joe Lyward. Cover design: Julian Humphries. Picture research: Jordan Mulligan. Publicity: Patrick Hargadon. Marketing: Tara Al Azzawi. Representation: the late Gillon Aitken, Clare Alexander, Lisa Baker.
THANKS
Cape Cod, New England & New York: Pat de Groot, Dennis, Deborah and Dory Minsky, John Waters, Mary Martin, the late Frank Schaefer, Jen Bradley, Sacha Richter, Laura Ludwig and Stormy Mayo, John and Marilyn Gullett, Elspeth Vevers, Elizabeth Bradfield, Jonathan Sinaiko, Chris Busa, Jessica Strauss, Jo Hay, Sebastian Junger, Tom Thompson, Albert Merola and James Balla; Mark Dalombo, Todd Motta and John Conlon at the Dolphin Fleet; Robert Tarr Edmunds Jr; Jim Bride; James Russell, Christina Colnett and Robert Rocha, New Bedford Whaling Museum; John Bryant and the Melville Society; Peter Gansevoort Whittemore, Jim Bride, Concord Free Public Library, Andrew Delbanco, David M. Friedman, Mick Rock. The Azores: Serge Viallelle and João Quaresma, Espaço Talassa. The Netherlands: Jeroen Hoekendijk, Ellen Gallagher. Mexico: Laura Logar, Isabel Cárdenas Oteiza; Alfredo T. Ortega, Centro Universitaro de la Costa. Catalunya: Claudia Casanova and Joan Eloi Roca, Ático de los Libros; Francesc Serés, the Faber Residency, Olot. Ireland: Peter Wilson, Ann Wilson and Jim Wilson; Mark Wickham, Tara Kennedy, Eoin Wickham and Sinéad Ní Bhroin; Aengus O’Marcaigh, Barra Ó Donnbháin, Alicia St. Ledger, Paul O’Regan. Scotland and the Western Isles: Roddy Murray, Ian Stephen, Julie Brook; WDC Scottish Dolphin Centre; Scottish Seabird Centre, North Berwick.
United Kingdom: Joe Lyward, Adam Low, Martin Rosenbaum, Jill Evans, James Norton; Andrew Sutton and Rachel Collingwood; Angela Cockayne, Alison Turnbull, Gareth Evans, Olivia Laing, Viktor Wynd, Iain Sinclair, Horatio Morpurgo, Jessica Sarah Rinland, Edward Sugden, Alex Farquharson, Volker Eichelmann, Marc Rees; Claire Doherty and Michael Prior at Situations; Tim Dee, Chris Watson, Duncan Minshull, Mark Cocker, Robert Macfarlane, Cillian Murphy, Tilda Swinton, Neil Tennant, Michael Bracewell, Brian Eno, Nicolas Roeg, Merlin Holland, Rupert Everett, Hugo Vickers, Paul Kildea, Andrew Motion; Peter Owen, Jane Potter and the Wilfred Owen Literary Estate; Stephen Hebron and Helen Gilio, The Bodleian Library; Susan Usher, English Faculty Library, Oxford; Hal Whitehead, Luke Rendell; Torquay Museum; Fr Claro Conde, Mary Hallett, Anna Eades, Katherine Anteney, Nick Moore, Clare Moore, Sam Goonetillake, Nigel Larcombe-Williams, Clare Goddard, Michael Holden, Pamela Ashurst and the late Ron Ashurst; Geoffrey Marsh, Victoria and Albert Museum; Louise Simkiss, Amy Miller, National Maritime Museum; Harriet Williams, Jane Fletcher, Mehta Bhavit, British Council; Damon Teagle, Millie Watts, National Oceanographic Centre; Dan Brown, Will May, Rebecca Smith, Stephanie Jones, Carole Burns, Matt Kerr, Karen Robson, Joel Found, University of Southampton. And my family and friends: Lawrence, Stephen, Christina and Katherine; Oliver, Cyrus, Harriet, Jacob, Lydia and Max; Mark, Ruth, Lilian and Freddie; and Tangle.
Philip Hoare, Easter 2017
SOURCES
www.4thEstate.co.uk/RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTARsources
and at www.philiphoare.co.uk
IMAGES
7, Special Collections, Hartley Library, University of Southampton; 31, 35, 45, 53, 55, 57, Pat de Groot; 48, The Straus Historical Archive; 61, 78, Dennis Minsky; 81, Benjamin D. Maxham/Pictorial Press/Alamy; 90, Maurice Adams Beck and Helen Macgregor, 1924, Getty Images; 104, The Lilly Library, Indiana University; 130, Dea Picture Library/Getty Images; 135, Erich Lessing/Magnum; 149, 151, © The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s; 172, Joe Lyward; 173, National Galleries of Scotland/Getty Images; 197, 198, courtesy of Nottingham City Museums and Galleries; 207, Bettmann/Getty Images; 211, Print Collector/Getty Images; 218, The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; 229, © Torre Abbey Collection/Bridgeman; 241, ART Collection/Alamy;
243, Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University, Waco, Texas; 257, PA Images; 260, 261, 269, 289, 294, The Wilfred Owen Literary Estate/Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, with special thanks for funding to the English Research Committee and the Department of English, University of Southampton; 276, The Wilfred Owen Literary Estate/Special Collections, The University of Manchester; 279, Archive.org; 296, Jean Pierre Lambré; 308, Print Collector/Getty Images; 309, Heritage Images/Getty Images; 315, De Agostini/Biblioteca Ambrosiana; 316, Royal Collection Trust, courtesy Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II; 321, Tate London; 324, ART Collection/Alamy; 364, National Library of Ireland; 381, Sinéad Ní Bhroin; 395, image from ‘John I’m Only Dancing’ video, © Mick Rock 1972, 2017.
All other images from the author’s collection. While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material, in some cases this has proved impossible. The publishers would be grateful for any information that would allow any omissions to be rectified in future editions of this book.
Also by Philip Hoare
Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant
Noel Coward: A Biography
Wilde’s Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy and the First World War
Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital
England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia
Leviathan or, The Whale
The Sea Inside
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