i saw a starfish
12.02 - big water
I am facing three large screens that curl around one side of the room, and another three hug me from behind. It is dark and warm, and I imagine a damp salt smell through my blocked nose. A cluster of furry creatures intuitively stumble and loll over rocky mossy crags playing wooden flutes. They perform rituals in dripping caves by the water in Thailand, drying their fur in sunshine. They are both cumbersome and graceful, and I find myself longing for their innocence and intelligence. Their sea home, crashing up against rocks as new rocks form in old rock crevices. Limpets and washed out blue.
They dive below Norway’s Arctic sea. I watch as their water-clad fur imitates seaweed, as they swoop beneath the ice water. Crunching salty fur, damp smell, coarse, tugging, my teeth grit. Fur and water like oil and vinegar. The sun is glinting like a searchlight.
25.03 - it’s not that deep
I am walking back from the studio, passed the cloud of perfumed laundry detergent that the hotel fumigates onto the street all day. Passed her kommer donut bakeri! - curious about their possible anatomy. Passed the yacht shop. I stop and look into the sea, and my eyes intruded on a tiny starfish.
I frown and it says no.
01.03. - dream motel
The city beach has a burger van that sells christmas trees in winter. Boats chug out oil daily. A small child crosses the road and thanks a car, a very adult gesture for someone so little. The seagulls from Patti’s dream motel soundtrack the sky. The city beach has the clearest water in the city, and in the close distance it looks cartoon blue and travel agency green. Is it artificially coloured?
Red campari oil slick as the cruise ship starts. A shard of a gold glittering wrapper waves up to me.
04.04. - fengari
And I think about the frantic search for the silver moon at the secret beach. A quarter of a century of Blue Star ferries, the taxi ride that scoops across the mountains, the pebbled beach shared with ducks. My first memory of a big full moon following us in that taxi, eyes half closed but the smell of pine felt like something I knew. White paper tablecloths dyed with tomato juice, wicker taverna seats moulded onto your thighs. A magical island with monster rocks dripping in clay, octopus legs with lemon and a secret beach 1 mile away that only appeared age 25. The silver moon ring was found, somewhere in the whole ocean.
6.02. - sand factory
We are scooping up sand from the gallery floor. The sand that rode on the back of a truck from from the big sand shop, where huge Ikea bags of different grains stacked, painstakingly sorted. I wonder if sand pick and mix was a thing. What type of grain was the city beach sand?
Another lost ring, this time the one made from a pebble from the island where secret beach hides. A strange moment in the world where you start to believe things are scripted. Admittedly, there was something amongst the leaves that day.
This time the ring wasn’t found, nowhere to be seen between 20 small bags of sand and 4 walls.
07.03 – how glass is made
When I first landed I wrote about the orange, specifically orange (its underlined a lot), lights that scatter the coast before touching down. It felt like the place is bursting at the edges, fracturing and splintering into islands, as if the sea couldn’t contain itself and ruptured through the ice and snow and rock.
Now, I’m standing on top of thick thick thick layers of black ice with tiny bubbles. There is creaking and groaning and sometimes a slow, bending, ancient echo skims from one mountain across the ice under my feet and back, like a network across the surface under my feet through layers of first frost then cold bubbles and then air then sea and fish and rocks and dirt maybe sand. I’ve never heard you complain but it’s nice to hear you now.
12.02 (again) - a strategy of distance
I don’t remember turning to the screens behind me. I didn’t, but the creaking bristly wedding-cake-like structure I’m sitting on has been slowly turning and I had drifted along with the current. Like that feeling of floating in the sea and opening your eyes to realize you are not where you began, that even though the big blue sky here looks like the big blue sky there, you moved on. Your course was charted and you were drifting when you specifically chose your spot and wanted to stay still.
These furry creatures taught me their language and rhythm. They taught me to imagine beyond the edges of your, my flesh.
11.04. – can it be routine yet
Another weird dream about arm wrestling the ancient arm that was salvaged from the sea in Call Me By Your Name.
The starfish is still there and the donuts are whole. You can see people making them through the windows, and the fresh sweet dough and clean hotel bed sheets make up for lack of salty smell.
~ Thanks to Tori Wrånes’ Big Water, the starfish and Patti Smith.