Saturday, October 24, 2009

Subtle Sea Musics...












The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of outer ocean on a beach. I have heard them all, and of the three elemental voices, that of ocean is the most awesome, beautiful, and varied. For it is a mistake to talk of the monotone of ocean or of the monotonous nature of its sound ... Every mood of the wind, every change in the day's weather, every phase of the tide - all these have subtle sea musics all their own ... the continuousness of it, sound of endless charging, endless incoming and gathering, endless fulfillment and dissolution...Above the tumult, like birds, fly wisps of watery noise, splashes and counter splashes, whispers, and seethings...


The seas are the heart's blood of the earth. Plucked up and kneaded by the sun and the moon, the tides are systole and diastole of the earth's veins ... Consider the marvel of what we see. Somewhere in the ocean, perhaps a thousand miles and more from this beach, the pulse beat of earth liberates a vibration, an ocean wave. Is the original force circular, I wonder? and do ocean waves ring out from the creative beat as they do on a quiet surface broken by a stone? Are there, perhaps, ocean circles so great and so intricate that they are unperceived?

...

Text ~ Excerpts from
Henry Beston's The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod, originally published in 1928, in which he devotes an entire chapter to the sounds of the Great Beach

Images ~ Film stills from the storm scene at Slea Head, Ireland, in
Ryan's Daughter, directed by David lean and photographed by Freddie Young. Lean and Young had to wait a year at Slea Head on the Dingle Peninsula before a great storm appeared.