Sunday, May 17th ~ It is 2:17 in the afternoon, and I am scrawling this in bird-seed font on an opened-up corrugated coffee condom. It is hardly the ideal medium upon which to write, but it is available, the mind is full, and the pen is excited.
Am at the seashore right now, writing while the children contentedly construct unhurried, ambitious dams under the helpful eye of a retired Boeing engineer. It is a glorious, glowing day; the kind where you can sit very still in your bare skin and not become cold ~ yet there is little risk of feeling your flesh burn. I am occupying myself with the timeless activity of picking up stones, examining them, then replacing them to appreciate new finds. However, they do not always go back, as my weighted camoflauged bag bears testament; some I'm keeping for further observation and later contemplation.
But today, it is more than unusual, heterogeneous rocks that is capturing my imagination: the spark first alit with the discovery of a miniscule bone-white, abandoned fortress ~ a craggy, hollowed-out cone without the dunce's pointy hat ~ looking somewhat lost amidst smooth rocks and broken shells. This interest has quickly blossomed into full-blown wonder as an entire, invisible shift is taking place.
My object of fascination is a sole barnacle: unstuck and adrift from its final host, it sits empty, brittle, and pristine in its unique and perfect form. I've never seen the inside of a barnacle before; this may well be because I generally used to harbour a rather intense aversion to these crustaceans. Whether it was a subconscious policy of protectionism from having cut my feet on them as a child or because of their prehistoric, exposed bone-like shards that encapsulated soft, squidgy living beings, I do not know.
As for this particular one, however, I am enraptured by its quiet, unassuming understatement and study of contrasts. Like a jagged molar of an adult jungle feline without its pulpish core, it features unrepentently flesh-cutting knives on top; inside, it is composed of folds and overlapping layers of homogenous shell, like the heart of a lily-white swamp orchid. It is absolutely ravishing.
Nevertheless, I find myself startled to become suddenly aware I am now intensely interested in barnacles ~ my long-term nemeses of the beach. Another rock has captured my attention: clustered atop a mottled lump of streaky granite stand in silent sentry ten of these long-dead creatures, their shells akin to arid, glacial towers, ready to receive and protect no one. Regardless of which, their clustered volcanic formations remain inhospitable and dangerous, their former inhabitants deceased and decomposed, their calcified horniness evidence of life once lived.
There is an unforgettable moment in the intensely stark, sumptuous, and spiritually mysterious film, IP5 or L'île aux Pachydermes, where a young nurse ~ while being wooed by an infatuated, handsome graffiti artist nicknamed Michelange ~ proclaims in choked anger, "Tu es une coquille vide!" ("You are an empty shell!") To any human ~ much less an artist or writer ~ to be accused as being one without a soul can surely be the harshest criticism to be dealt.
(Ironically, it was the last film of cinematic legend Yves Montand ~ France's equivalent to Britain's Laurence Olivier ~ who died of heart failure before the shoot even wrapped, while it was an early film for the swarthy and swoon-worthy Olivier Martinez ~ a perfect case of one taking off where the other touches down.)
Of all species, we are the ones who have choice and ability to deal with our dead in the desired manner expressed before the last breath is taken and sighed. Our bodies do not remain as edificial sculptures in the way barnacles do.
Because of our souls' natural inclinations to attach meaning to things, people, gestures, silences, looks, touches, songs, and poems, we don't leave behind physical Babels borne of our natural states; we dissolve into our landscapes, as in a Seurat drawing. Through our spirits and actions, however, we breathe long after death into the spaces of silence and speech of those with whom we interacted and in those whom we loved. Our fortresses are not so much physical, but relational. Our ephemeral shells decompose, but we are ~ for better or for worse ~ remembered.
by Georges Seurat (1859–1891)
Like barnacles, we cluster together, yet also thrive in solitude. We do not live in and of ourselves, but band together, separate, stand with others, stand alone, persist, and desist. Our actions bless, wound, fill, and deflate the spirits of others, but we are comprised of complexities that are not understood upon first sight, or even second or third. Our bodies protect the souls which imbue our cells with life, just as the hermaphrodite beings of barnacles inhabit the tight buds of their sculptural stone roses.
Despite their silent, stubborn stoicism in the waters that simultaneously melt rocks and sustain life, flinty barnacles still need something solid and strong onto which they must cling to survive. And in our moments of pained loneliness and terrified internal conflict, there we also are: little denizen sentinels hanging onto our beliefs, creeds, and intrinsic moral codes ~ sometimes in clusters, sometimes all alone ~ but somehow always significant... and absolutely ravishing on the inside.
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