Playing with Water

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  For occasionally on Tiwarik the detonations of dynamite fishers lose their free-enterprise innocence and acquire menace. I hear them as not merely an assault on a pocket of food but as part of the increasing barrage sustained against the natural world under the often specious guise of feeding the massing mouths of humanity. At such times my aversion to meat seems likely to extend to fish and for a while I hate this whole bloodletting process by which I have come to know and watch the sea. But a camera is no substitute for a hunter’s spear: it gets in the way of the eye. Therein lies an irony.

  At other times the explosions jar the balance at a deeper level, hinting at threat and unease. They suggest a different kind of encroachment, the very blatancy of their echoes drawing attention to their unlawfulness. One day Arman will look back and be amazed at the freedom he had to go about his daily life with bombs and poison. Sooner or later political control will come. It will come to me, too. The very oddness of my presence and lack of any plausible cover story draws attention to me as effectively as dynamite. In a world besotted by control – and hence phobic about its lack – the days of the stranger who can spend his time alone on an island may be numbered.

  Already I can look back and see that many of the things I did in my twenties are virtually impossible today. I once worked a passage from Manaus to Recife aboard a German tramp steamer, the Hilde Mittmann, scrubbing down the engine-room walls in exchange for food and a bunk. At night I sat in the forepeak or walked the deck while the pilot, taken on in mid-river one afternoon and conversant with the ever-changing sandbars and shoals of the Amazon, took us close enough into the bank to send showers of seeds and leaves bursting in through portholes and jalousies to lie on the bunks. It was on one of those nights that the ship’s wireless officer, a gruff, square lady who shared her cabin with an ape, left her door open for a breath of air and was desolated by the sight of her companion’s hairy backside flashing skyward as he clutched at a passing branch and regained his freedom. In Belém I took spells of duty in the hold as Brazilian stevedores unloaded sacks of pepper. Beside me, visibly to hand, was the Captain’s revolver (unloaded) as a deterrent to theft. The rich oily smell of hot peppercorns still evokes the pungent memory of those days.

  Similarly, I worked a passage from Singapore to Labuan Island and on to Sarawak aboard a freighter. On Labuan I went to the cottage hospital – a cool thatched building with a verandah all round it in whose shade pregnant women chatted as butterflies drifted in and out – to have a deep splinter removed from my foot. The young Malaysian doctor sent to deal with me turned out to have been trained at St Stephen’s, Fulham Road at the time when I had been working there and we recognised one another on sight. A few nights later I was standing at the ship’s rail staring out past a natural gas burn-off flare in mid-ocean towards the unseen coast of Borneo, tired after a day spent re-stacking sacks of copra in the hold. The world suddenly seemed blissfully full of adventure and possibility, my passage through it an intent drift in the course of which it was entirely to be expected that one would bump into fragments of a previous life in London on tiny tropical islands. By day I leaned over the side during breaks from work and watched the flying fish burst like pheasants, late and at unexpected angles, from under the ship’s forefoot and skim away across the aquamarine. It was hypnotic, the blinding white scud of foam sliding across the vision and vanishing astern. Tears of pleasure rose to my eyes. I had found a vocation as wanderer and seafarer.

  Nowadays, I think, such casual journeyings have become more difficult. Not only has the world’s merchant navy changed its habits since containerisation but security and union regulations lay down strict guidelines for crewing. Throughout this century the wide-open world which people were once remarkably free to wander if they had the time and inclination (little money was needed) has shrunk and shrunk. Air travel has become nearly obligatory: there is often no alternative. The lemming habits of tourists do, it is true, help define the areas of the world the rest of us may avoid; but governments and even local expectations can sometimes make it hard to escape being treated like a tourist who has merely had the misfortune to become separated from his party.

  I am thankful to have been alive in an age when it was still just possible to be footloose without having to join either package tours to Seven Asian Cities or marijuana trails to Khatmandu. Meanwhile the explosions which lift little exclamation marks in the straits off Tiwarik remind me of lawlessness but also of the massing infantry of control which societies are so anxious to deploy and which on all sides is poised to rush in and occupy the remaining hinterlands. For the special wildness of Tiwarik will be thoroughly and finally dispersed the day silence falls and it is designated an official nature reserve or a scuba-diving resort.

  ‘After-comers cannot guess the beauty been,’ Hopkins wrote of the cutting down of the poplars at Binsey, firmly in the English literary tradition which associates landscape with loss. But now from a very un-English landscape and with the sensation of hearing great sawings, bulldozings and demolitions borne on the wind from somewhere over the horizon, I pass on that disheartening thought to my bereft counterpart in fifty years’ time as he contemplates beds of dead corals beneath a sea as empty of fish as the summer lanes of England will be of butterflies. It will always be too late for each generation to see all the previous generation saw.

  *

  Sooner or later I shall have to visit England, see people. Such trips fill me with mixed pleasure and dread. There is that imperceptibly widening gulf between oneself and family and friends, the crack of black water opening up as between a departing ship and the quay. This is an absurd perspective, of course. Such things are relative, neither the ship nor quay stands still. But with the passing of each lump of time it becomes apparent that we are bound on gently divergent courses. It is a melancholy fact. I am attuned to another climate, other sounds, different smells.

  In particular I am attuned to a different speed. The last time I was in London I was bemused and stunned by it. I stood on kerbsides unable to remember where I was going, what I was supposed to be doing, who I was. There were too many clothes on my body, my shoes pinched, the air was cold and stank of fumes. After the lively silences of Kansulay and Tiwarik the battering traffic blotted me out. It seemed there was no space left in which to think, in which to move. I must have looked like any hick or bumpkin forlorn in the great metropolis, a city I had once known quite well and even on occasion liked for its quiet backwaters, its libraries and abandoned wharves. Now the sea felt immeasurably far away and it was in any case the wrong sea: freezing green-grey masses of water trawled for great numb cod rather than the basking gulfs, the individual prey stalked like lovers through coralline waters.

  In rhetorical moments I say: ‘I don’t know how on earth people can live in England.’ What I actually mean, of course, is that I no longer know of any way in which I could. I have lost the knowledge of how to get by in a predominantly urban society. I am no longer intrigued enough by its arcana, blandished enough by its pleasures, consoled enough by its facilities. Provided the climate is warm I don’t mind a leaky roof, washing dishes in the sea, fetching water on my shoulder. They are neither pleasures nor hardships, simply the minimal terms on which one lives in a way one chooses in a landscape of one’s choice.

  Thirty-five years ago I would look wistfully at the milk-float arriving outside the school kitchens. It had come of its own accord from another world, a world beyond the gates where people were free to do as they wanted. That world was not so much the territory of adults as the location of an unstructured freedom of choice. There, people could get up and leave rooms without asking permission; they could legitimately find themselves in a shop at ten o’clock in the morning; get on a bus, go to the cinema; they weren’t forced to say prayers or write letters. Nowadays when I am in England the sense of once again being captive in an institution grows on me. I strain as if to catch the faintest signs of life seven thousand miles away, the light and freedom for which I
yearn. I panic. Perhaps I may never escape the uniform shopping malls, the fast-food bars, the sheer civic determination of it all. Some unsuspected law or sudden edict will prevent my leaving so that for the rest of my life I shall have to languish in dullness, overeaten, overmedicated, overinsured, overanxious. As the red buses hiss past in the rain and the double glazing shudders to the harmonics of their engines I ache and ache for the sea, to go back to work deep in the fish-mines. I long for the forest where the komokons call and the great bats fly, for lost companions.

  One summer day, many years ago in Oxford, I had sat at luncheon with Robert Graves, then Poetry Professor. The great man had dried shaving soap in his right ear and three days’ silver stubble. The ordeal of Encaenia was over, his year’s duty done. I imagine he itched to shed his borrowed finery and get back to Majorca. He asked me what I wanted to do or be and my reply irritated him.

  ‘But it seems to me you are a poet,’ he said dismissively, as if certain things might be taken for granted while I ought at least to have come up with a more amusing suggestion. All right for him; I secretly burned with pleasure for a long time. It was the only compliment of my life whose manner of payment made it almost credible.

  Years later Arman helps me back on board the Jhon-Jhon after three hours’ fishing. Our haul is not by any means spectacular, his better than mine but not by much. I scarcely give it a thought, it is a workaday morning’s food-gathering. As Intoy starts the engine and heads the boat for Tiwarik to drop me off Arman says, staring at his home village’s distant shoreline:

  ‘You know, if you had been born in Sabay you would have been as good as anyone and a lot better than most. But starting when you were, what? Forty …?’

  He makes my belated change of profession sound a sad error rather than a bizarre affectation. The compliment overwhelms me. I am so pleased I can hardly bear myself. One might remain a poet for life without writing much more than the odd sonnet. But to be a hunter one had to hunt: one had to go down and get food and come back up, time and time again.

  ‘Look at us,’ says Arman, meaning the people of Sabay. ‘How old am I? Twenty-eight next birthday. And the others? Hardly any of them twenty-five, most twenty, twenty-one. The people here don’t usually go on spear fishing much beyond thirty, you notice. It’s too hard, it’s a young man’s business. They go on to dynamite, hook-and-line, nets, fish-traps.’

  ‘I know. I’ve left it too late.’

  ‘To become the best, of course. You’ll never be that. That’s why I said you ought to have been born here. Plenty of boys born here, ay, they don’t want to fish, they’re frightened or they don’t like the sea so they plant rice and hunt baboy damu instead. But the ones who do want to fish are watching and learning for fifteen years.’

  There is no catching up, of course. Defensively I say to the scudding water:

  ‘Well, old Inso is still spear fishing and he’s fifty-six.’

  ‘Surely. There are several men around here even older than him who still take their panà out. And they’re good, not just because they’re so experienced but like you they’ve got something which keeps them good even when their wind’s going and they’ve no longer any stomach for tackling the big eels. They love it. That’s what makes the difference. Ha, I’ve watched you so many times. I’ve seen you go down straight past a bantol or a ray hidden in the sand and I wonder if you’ve gone blind. But I think you just like being down there. I think often you are not so interested in killing fish.’

  Arman drops me off on the shingle and heads back home to cook up fertiliser. Even though I have irrevocably misspent my life, even though I have wasted my chances of doing something really well, I climb up to my hut full of self-pleasure. It is deeply satisfying for love to be found out.

  But it is nothing to carry back to England. A passion for the blue glinting flakes of micro-organisms borne along in the tropical drift, a passion for insignificant molluscs, for the colour of a weed, for the single eye in a crevice, is rendered dumb in London’s uproar. It sounds silly, too, when expressed over a dinner-table sandwiched between gossip from Academe and scandals in Bohemia. All of a sudden a love which has sustained me for isolate months is unconvincing, jejune. If one had wanted to study a fish’s eye one should have been a marine biologist. Had one intended to talk about the Philippines one ought at least to have read the right books. Instead I make the mistake of trying to describe what it is to be a hunter. It is disastrous, the very word has the wrong sound: Hemingwayesque, fading-macho, anti-conservationist. Mine is a world away from such stuff, from trophies, record tarpon and barracuda, from high-powered boats with ‘fighting chairs’ bolted to the deck. But once the images have been set loose they are beyond recalling. When I crossly demolish the aura of Caribbean playgrounds I am left with that of native chic or – far worse – of a pelagic Richard Jefferies. Having explained myself badly I become ratty, withdrawn. I scowl from a sofa and sip coffee. I myself begin to wonder whether I might not just have returned from a choppy passage through a ‘mid-life crisis’, a concept which was aired over dinner.

  Yet all the time the sea moves in me. It inhabits me like a massive angel in this landlocked city. Only, I cannot say it aloud. As if it were an eccentric belief, an embarrassing perversion, I hide my secret although not so well it could never be inferred. There are many things worse than being thought perverted and one is to be pitied for having no love of any kind.

  *

  Thus the irony of having made an exhilarating discovery is that one must fall silent on a sofa in a city. The discovery itself is simple enough but is such an insult to the twentieth century it does appear perverse: the wish to keep the sun’s time, to listen to the wind. I like to watch day break and night fall although I still have little interest in sunrises or sunsets. But unless I live with an eye, an ear and a nose to that slow, complex cycle I am cut off from a source of intelligence. This being said I readily acknowledge how badly I would fare without work, without writing, without something to counteract the tendency towards rural idiocy. Maybe only mystics can live in caves, eating mist and drinking rain and excreting holy laughter. Others like myself are much too amused by doing things in the sun, brief as it is.

  I only wish there were a way of transmitting a message back through time to my former self as he sat whiling away a French lesson in June 1953, although I am not sure what that message would be. How could I reply to the one he sent me, dense child, ignorant of what he was doing and yet getting it right? Disdainfully rejecting his father’s demand that he should admire sunsets and views he drew his answer, saying plainly: There is no such thing as landscape: write your own. Probably the only message I could send him is: Keep this exercise book; one day it’ll surprise you. So maybe I have sent it after all and maybe he did receive it. I can’t imagine how else I could successfully have kept the book’s existence a secret from myself for thirty years unless I was acting on my own instructions.

  From its cap of wild forest to its coral roots Tiwarik is entire. But on certain cloudless days it can be that each of its extremities dissolves into blue, its bounds become endless. Instead of remaining a cartographer’s outline the island expands like a drop of intense colour let fall on a sheet of wet paper. It is as though I might walk or swim indefinitely without crossing my own track and without ever leaving the place. Its air draws memories out, absolves them, opens wide on all sorts of happy possibilities.

  We might not imagine a more re-creational task than drawing our lands, like certain Filipinos wistfully mapping Manila to themselves, as having the largesse of desire and with the spaciousness of the future. Beneath each map are visible the traces of previous sketches, outgrown essays. The re-drawings, imagination itself, are endless. Protocities, proto-islands, they accrete upon their predecessors’ foundations, become our own patina. Only after an unknown length of time there is no desire left and expectation ceases. Then a new strange wind blows up and like the echoes of clouds on a glassy sea the many outlines tremble and wa
ver, erase themselves, are blown away. The space they leave is filled at once with energy and playfulness.

  *

  It is shortly after sunrise. Pallid day is coming on behind marbling clouds. The boat, its paint weathered away, rocks with its nose on the shore, ashy beneath callow flukes of light. Intoy and I are cleaning our night’s catch on the coral shingle. He seems disinclined to go home, which given our catch he certainly should: six large blue and green parrotfish, a decent squid and several small octopus, surgeon-fish and much else besides including a kamansi. This last is a porcupine fish, one of the Diodontidae. It is still alive. Its sad, ugly face is tacked ridiculously onto one side of its inflated football-sized body. At the opposite end a minute tail wiggles as an absurd appendage. Far out on either edge tiny fins whir spasmodically.

  As we clean the other fish the kamansi lolls impotently on the edge of the violet sea to which it will never return. Its defensive hydraulic system is leaking water slowly through my spear holes but periodically and with pathetic wet pantings it tries to pump itself up to its original iron hardness. It sounds like what it is: a sucking chest wound. Its bulging black expressionless eyes suddenly catch a ray of the strengthening light and I glimpse the shadowed gold of its retinas. I am filled with pity for the creature, with the utmost remorse for what I have done to it. Whatever the respect of the hunter for his prey, whatever access the hunt may give him to a hidden and accurate world, however much he kills only to eat, there are times when he feels the force with which he jars up against that dilemma which everybody alike faces, even if they think their hands are spotlessly clean of blood. It is the same dilemma of which Barry Lopez wrote after the Eskimos he knew had hunted whale and walrus, ‘how to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in all life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s own culture but within oneself.’ This is not a religious darkness, not the soul’s night, nothing as mere as depression. It is the great rage, the value-free savagery every mortal carries within him, even the gentlest and most reflective of men. Denying it is useless: it declares itself obliquely in dreams, in patterns of speech, in unconscious acts. Too studied a gentleness comes to look like ignorance; later it is its own form of aggression.