The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch
Perhaps this is a foolish moment, so late at night, to choose to approach the subject, but it has come suddenly and vividly into my head. The reader, if there is one, may wonder why I have not referred again to a ‘horrible experience’ which I suffered here beside the sea but could not bring myself to describe. It might seem by now that I had ‘forgotten’ it; and indeed in an odd way I think I had forgotten it: a tendency which is evidence, perhaps, for one possible view of the phenomenon. Let me now describe what happened.
I was sitting, with this notebook beside me, upon the rocks just above my ‘cliff’, and looking out over the water. The sun was shining, the sea was calm. (As I have described it in the first paragraph of this notebook.) Shortly before this I had been looking intently into a rock pool and watching a remarkably long reddish faintly bristly sea-worm which had wreathed itself into curious coils prior to disappearing into a hole. I sat up, then settled myself facing seaward, blinking in the sun. Then, not at once, but after about two minutes, as my eyes became accustomed to the glare, I saw a monster rising from the waves.
I can describe this in no other way. Out of a perfectly calm empty sea, at a distance of perhaps a quarter of a mile (or less), I saw an immense creature break the surface and arch itself upward. At first it looked like a black snake, then a long thickening body with a ridgy spiny back followed the elongated neck. There was something which might have been a flipper or perhaps a fin. I could not see the whole of the creature, but the remainder of its body, or perhaps a long tail, disturbed the foaming water round the base of what had now risen from the sea to a height of (as it seemed) twenty or thirty feet. The creature then coiled itself so that the long neck circled twice, bringing the now conspicuous head low down above the surface of the sea. I could see the sky through the coils. I could also see the head with remarkable clarity, a kind of crested snake’s head, green-eyed, the mouth opening to show teeth and a pink interior. The head and neck glistened with a blue sheen. Then in a moment the whole thing collapsed, the coils fell, the undulating back still broke the water, and then there was nothing but a great foaming swirling pool where the creature had vanished.
The shock and the horror of it were so great that for some time I could not move. I wanted to run away, I feared beyond anything that the animal would reappear closer to land, perhaps rising up at my very feet. But my legs would not function and my heart was beating so violently that any further exertion might have rendered me unconscious. The sea had become calm again and nothing further happened. At last I got up and walked slowly back to the house. I went up the stairs and into the drawing room where I sat for some time just breathing carefully and holding my heart. I could not bear to take my usual place at the window, so I sat at the little table against the wall of the inner room, leaning my head against the wall, and about half an hour later I was able to write down what now appears as the second paragraph in this notebook.
During that time, as I held on to myself and breathed and trembled, I managed gradually to think about what had occurred. Thought, rational thought, which had been utterly routed, returned gradually to my rescue. Something had happened and happenings have explanations. Several possible explanations came before me, and as I began to number and classify and relate them some relief came, and the awful unconceptualized terror receded. It was possible that I had ‘simply’ imagined what I saw. But of course one does not ‘simply’ imagine anything so detailed and dreadful. It later struck me as significant that the creature had appeared at once as utterly frightful, rather than as very surprising or even interesting. I was excessively frightened. I am a moderate drinker and certainly not an unbalanced or crazily ‘imaginative’ person. Another possibility was that I had, again ‘simply’, seen a monster unknown to science. Well, that was just possible. Or: was what I had seen an absolutely enormous eel? Could there be such an eel? Did eels ever rise up out of the sea and wreathe themselves into coils and balance themselves high in the air? I could not think that the thing was an eel, this was impossible. It had a substantial body, I had seen its back. I was quite sure too that I could not have seen a mere eel, however large, as this coiling monstrosity through which I had looked at the sky.
How far off had the animal been and how high above the water had it risen? On further reflection I was not so certain of my first impressions, though I remained sure that I had seen something absolutely remarkable. Explanations in terms of floating seaweed or bobbing driftwood were not to be considered. I explored another possibility. Just before I saw my huge monster I had been closely inspecting, in the rock pool, a little monster, the red bristling worm, whose five or six inches of wriggling body appeared big in the confined space of the pool. Was it possible that through some purely optical mechanism, some unusual trick of the retina, I had ‘thrown’ the image of the worm out onto the surface of the sea? This was an interesting idea but totally implausible, since the red worm bore no resemblance to the bluish-blackish monster, except in so far as both of them had wreathed into coils. Besides, I had never heard of any such retinal ‘cinematography’. I was struck, on reflection, by the fact that I recalled the creature with extreme clarity, the visual impression remained extremely detailed, while at the same time I felt more and more vague about its exact distance away from me.
The solution which I now think to be the most probable, though whether I shall continue to think so remains to be seen, is this, and I record it with a little shame. I am neither a drunkard nor a drug addict. I scarcely ever drink spirits. I have smoked ‘hash’ occasionally in America. However, on one occasion, several years ago, I was idiot enough to take a dose of LSD. (I did it to please a woman.) I had what is known as a ‘bad trip’. It was a very bad trip. I shall not attempt to describe what I experienced on that dreadful and rather shameful occasion. (I will only add: it concerned entrails.) In fact it would be extremely hard, even impossible, to put it properly into words. It was something morally, spiritually horrible, as if one’s stinking inside had emerged and become the universe: a surging emanation of dark half-formed spiritual evil, something never ever to be escaped from. ‘Undetachable, ’ I remember, was a word which somehow ‘came along’ with the impression of it. In fact the visual images involved were dreadfully clear and, as it were, authoritative ones and they are rising up in front of me at this moment, and I will not write about them. Of course I never took LSD again. I had no further after-effects, and after a while I began mercifully to forget the experience in the quite special way in which one forgets a dream. However: it is possible, perhaps plausible, to conjecture that the sea monster which I ‘saw’ was a hallucination which was also caused by my one foolish experiment with that awful drug.
It is true that the rising coiling monster did not really resemble what I saw on the first occasion, any more than it resembled the red worm in the pool. But the feeling of horror was similar in quality, or at any rate began to seem so very soon after the experience itself. Also, the quality of the tendency to forget also now seems to me to be similar in the two cases. A bad trip can recur in this way, I am told: readers, be warned. However, it must be admitted that as I reflect about it all at this moment, the strongest evidence for this explanation is the total implausibility of all the others.
My heart is beating violently again. I must go to bed. Perhaps I should have waited until tomorrow morning to tell this story. I shall take a sleeping pill.
Two days have passed since I wrote the above. I slept well after writing about my monster and I still think my explanation is the right one. Anyway he recedes and the horror has gone away. Perhaps it did me good to write it all down. I have decided that the ‘footsteps’ in the attics are rats. Another sunny day. Still no letters.
I swam again at the little stony beach and although the sea was fairly calm I had the same irritating difficulty getting out of it. I had to climb a steep bank of tumbling shifting pebbles while each successive wave was submerging me from behind. Swallowed a lot of water and cut my foot. Found my abandoned pi
It has occurred to me that if I attached a rope to the iron banister at the tower steps I could use the steps even in rough weather; and if I could find anything to tie it to I could dangle a rope over my ‘cliff’ to help me out of the water there. I must see if the village shop sells rope. I must also find out where I can get more cylinders of calor gas.
My paternal grandfather was a market gardener in Lincolnshire. (There, quite suddenly I have started to write my autobiography, and what a splendid opening sentence! I knew it would happen if I just waited.) He lived in a house called Shaxton. I thought it was very distinguished to have a house with a name. I do not know what my maternal grandfather did, he died when I was a small child. I think he ‘worked in an office’, as indeed my father did too. Doubtless he was some sort of clerk; as indeed my father was too I suppose, though we never used the word ‘clerk’ at home. My paternal grandfather had two sons, Adam and Abel. He never seemed to me to be an imaginative man, but there was some touch of poetry in those names. It was early evident to me that my uncle (Abel) was more loved and more fortunate than my father (Adam). How does a child perceive such things, or rather how is it that they are so perceptible, so obvious, to a child, who perhaps, like a dog, reads signs which have become invisible amid the conventions of the grown-up world, and are thus overlooked in the adult campaign of deceit? I knew that my father, who was slightly the elder of the two, was some sort of luckless failure before I knew what ‘failure’ meant, before I knew anything about money, status, power, fame or any of those coveted prizes whose myriad forms have led me throughout my life that dervish dance which is now, I trust, over. And of course when I say that my dear father was a failure I mean it only in the grossest worldly sense. He was an intelligent good man, pure in heart.
My maternal grandparents lived in Carlisle and I scarcely knew them. My mother’s sisters figured as two pale ‘aunties’, also in Carlisle. My paternal grandmother died young, and in my memories of Shaxton she appears as a photograph. Indeed my grandfather, whom I disliked and feared, appears to me now only as Wellington boots and a loud voice. Adam and Abel crowded my childhood world, dominating it like twin gods. My mother was a separate force, always separate. And then of course there was my cousin James who, like me, was an only child.
The ways of the brothers parted. My father drifted into Warwickshire and worked in ‘local government’. Drifted: I see him on a raft. Uncle Abel became a successful barrister in Lincoln and lived in a house in the country called Ramsdens: another distinguished place with a name. Ramsdens was larger than Shaxton. I still see both those houses in my dreams. Later on the Uncle Abels moved to London, but kept Ramsdens as what they called their ‘country cottage’. Uncle Abel married a rich pretty American girl called Estelle. I remember her being referred to by my mother as an ‘heiress’. My father married my mother who was working as a secretary on a farm. Her name was Marian. He called her ‘Maid Marian’. She was a strict evangelical Christian. My father was a Christian too of course, so was I, so was Uncle Abel until Aunt Estelle took him away into the world of light. I cannot see my mother as a lovely girl, as the Maid Marian of the Warwickshire lanes. I see her face, in my earliest memories, as a mask of anxiety. She was the strong one. My father and I loved and obeyed and comforted each other in secret. Well, we all three loved and comforted each other. We were poorish and lonely and awkward together.
I was utterly horrified in the kitchen this morning to see what I took to be a grotesquely huge fat fleshy spider emerging from the larder. It turned out to be a most engaging toad. I caught him easily and carried him across the wood to the mossy boggy pools beyond the rocks. Here he ambled away. How can such gentle defenceless animals survive? I lingered for a little while after the toad had gone, and looked at the red-tufted mosses and the flowers, mare’s tails which I remember from my youth, and that weird yellow flower that catches flies. Heather grows upon the higher ground inland, towards Amorne Farm. I was told by the house agent that there are orchids in the vicinity, but I have seen none. Perhaps they are as legendary as the seals.
Later on I went into the village to buy deep-freeze kipper fillets (the poor man’s smoked salmon). Of course it is quite impossible to buy fresh fish here, as all the villagers tell me with pride. I also made some rather inconclusive enquiries about a laundry. So far I have washed everything myself, including the sheets which I lay out to dry upon the lawn. Perhaps I will continue to do this; there is a remarkable satisfaction in the performance of these simple tasks. I forgot to record that I have found a second shop in the village, a sort of ironmonger’s, in the row of cottages behind the pub. It calls itself the Fishermen’s Stores and no doubt did once sell gear to the fishermen. This place, I discovered this morning, supplies paraffin and calor gas. I also purchased from them some candles, a new oil lamp and a length of rope. Carrying these trophies I dropped into the Black Lion on the way home. The bar there falls silent when I enter and bursts into raucous chatter when I leave, but I propose to make a habit of coming nonetheless. The mild hostility of the villagers does not worry me. Of course, thanks to television, they know who I am. But they have been at pains to exhibit indifference, and indeed, in all their worthy simplicity, they may even be indifferent. For them I am perhaps something ‘unreal’, touched by the unreality of the medium itself. No one, thank God, has attempted to befriend me.
For lunch I ate the kipper fillets rapidly unfrozen in boiling water (the sun had done most of the work) garnished with lemon juice, oil, and a light sprinkling of dry herbs. Kipper fillets are arguably better than smoked salmon unless the latter is very good. With these, fried tinned new potatoes. (No real new potatoes yet.) Potatoes are for me a treat dish, not a dull everyday chaperon. Then Welsh rarebit and hot beetroot. The shop sliced bread is less than great, but all right toasted, with good salty New Zealand butter. Fortunately I like a wide variety of those crackly Scandinavian biscuits which are supposed to make you thin. (Of course they do not. If you are destined to be fat, food makes you fat. But I have never had a weight problem.) Now that I own land I must have a herb garden. A supply of fresh herbs has always been a problem of my life as an enlightened eater. (Of course the notion of growing herbs never entered my head as a child in my parents’ garden: I suspect children cannot understand food.) But where am I to put it? I hesitate to dig up either of my little lawns, and anyway they are rather too close to the sea. If I were to make myself a secret allotment on the other side of the road, would some peasant or animal rob it? I must reflect on these things: happy and innocent reflections, so unlike the agonizings of the past!
After lunch I cut off a length of my rope and tied it onto the iron banister at the tower steps, and now it trails handily into the sea, moving darkened in the waves. I have knotted the seaward end for easier grasp. I have had less success with the ‘cliff’ for the simple reason that there is nothing here to attach the rope to. The rocks are too humpy and smooth, and the rope is not long enough to reach the house. Buy a longer piece and attach it to the kitchen door or to the post at the bottom of the stairs, and haul the long wet end into the kitchen every night? These problems too are not without interest. The rope itself is beautiful stuff, lightly burnished and smelling like retsina. I am told it is made locally.
I spent part of the afternoon lying upon my rock ‘bridge’, between the house and the tower, and watching the waves coming flying through beneath me and killing themselves in fits of rage in the deep enclosed rocky area on the inland side. The sight of the rushing foaming water made me feel, after a while, almost light-headed, as if I might have become giddy and fallen in. Most enjoyable. I am a bit dismayed however to find, from studying the picture postcards in the shop, that my bridge and its whirlpool are well-known local features. Fortunately the cards seemed rather old and crumpled, and I bought up the entire stock f
Statements made by distant church bells remind me it is Sunday. Today the sky has become cloudy. I have been watching the clouds and it occurs to me that I have never done this in my life before, simply sit and watch clouds. As a child I would have been far too anxious to ‘waste time’ in this way. And my mother would have stopped me. As I write this I am sitting on my plot of grass behind the house where I have put a chair, cushions, rugs. It is evening. Thick lumpy slate-blue clouds, their bulges lit up to a lighter blue, move slowly across a sky of muddy and yet brilliant gold, a sort of dulled gilt effect. At the horizon there is a light glittering slightly jagged silver line, like modern jewellery. Beneath it the sea is a live choppy lyrical goldeny-brown, jumping with white flecks. The air is warm. Another happy day. (‘Whatever will you do down there?’ they asked.)