“For every appetite, there is a world. The dreamer then participates in the world by nourishing himself from one of the substances of the world, a dense or rare, warm or gentle substance clear or full of penumbra according to the temperament of his imagination.”
(Bachelard 178)  

The appetite of my imagination that craves the ocean craves the sublime depth, width and fury of the sea. The ocean is a waterbody of movement in waves, rivulets, curls, vortices, currents, storms, tides. Reverie with the ocean is one of diffusion as the substance of thoughts follows the rise and fall of tide and wave and intensifies along the thin slip of horizon. For there is always horizon with the ocean, always the love-affair between sea and sky. Ocean reveries are dreams in color: emerald green-gold light, white blurred beachbreak spray, the tiny sky-colored mirrors on every water surface, and the soft blue wash of memory. Ocean reveries illuminate the breath of salt water through bodies and within bodies as currents and tides. This water-breath is a reverie in creation and creativity and adaptation and generosity and gestation and sensitivity and ferocity and luminosity and life and salt and blood and art.

“A poetic force leads these phantoms of reverie. This poetic force animates all the senses; reverie becomes polysensorial.” (Bachelard 162)

“Ah! how a passage which pleases us can make us live! …one learns that … at certain times, internal lights render opaque bodies translucent…” (Bachelard 162)

One learns that at certain times, internal lights render opaque bodies translucent. Internal lights render opaque bodies translucent. Reverie is an opening, a softening into the internal worlds of things. Reverie is the spill of light into water at the rising crest of a wave. Reverie is a depth where light flickers in curtains. Reverie is the palpitating shoreline of a descending night tide. Reverie is the wind-shift of oval-shaped reflections in ripples to jagged-edged wavelets. Reverie is backwards-bent curl of beach break spray. Reverie is the lace offering left by a wave at the land’s edge. Reverie is a ripeness, a fullness, an opening. So is art.

“In memories it is always blue, slow, light. Why?” (Bachelard 127)

Franz Hellens:
“My memory is fragile; I quickly forget the contour, the feature; only the melody remains within me. I have difficulty retaining the object, but I cannot forget the atmosphere, which is the sonority of things and beings.” (Bachelard 135)

Water is home. Not just any water, but the extreme surge of flood and ebb where northern salt water meets muddy river water. The memory of the sea lives in my body as slow, deep, blue, resonant and illuminated. I am oriented towards the sea. I feel the magnetic pull of salt water at my blood, as if my connection to the pull of moon or the pull of the cosmos is stronger on the shore than inland. Our asymmetry concentrates all our sensory organs to orient forward and all my sensory organs orient seaward.

Memory: saltwater from my eyes matched and trumped by the salt spray of sea.
Memory: shore scents of kelp, receding wave, burst seafoam, distant-born wind.
Memory: luminous green waves as the clear flood water pushed against the east wind, the sandbars, the river ebb; confused seas, choppy waters, wave pyramids collided and burst, simply burst into air; saltair filtered through my curled-back eyelashes as I looked into the wind, looked with the sun setting rays, stinging.
Memory: eyes unfocused at the frothing white raging horses of the boat wake.
Memory: fullness, safety, relief of high tide; excitement, danger, awe at the early a.m. sisterhood of high tide and wind; expectation, magic, curves of slacktide hightide fish.
Memory: the sleep of the fish, the waterdreams of waterbodies held in the cradle of the hull; a return.
Memory: body in a body; salt skin girl enveloped by liquid light waves.
Memory: breath.
Memory: motion.
Memory: light.

“Constantly moving in a dance that mirrors the tempo of the human body, waves break in time with the beating of our hearts, the in and out of our breaths, like a metronome marking the present moment: now, now.”
                –Ran Ortner, artist statement (http://www.ranortner.com/#!/statement)

“This idealizing psychology is an undeniable psychic reality. The reverie idealizes both its object and the dreamer at the same time. And when the reverie lives in a dualism of the masculine and the feminine, the idealization is concrete and limitless at the same time.” (Bachelard 58)

What do I idealize about the ocean? What do I idealize about myself when I daydream of the sea? 

Luminosity. I idealize the light and clarity where the sea rises and thins to peaks and waves and collisions and spray. I idealized that moment when the low-angle sunset light and east wind gale split the green whitecaps and they burst into spray to illuminate the entire sky with salt particles which stuck in my wind-curled eyelashes. I idealize the way water takes light and bleeds it into its vortices. I idealize the fusion of light and liquid on the surface, and how the deep blue of darkness blends in from the bottom up. I idealize the way water holds sky and how water holds depth and dark in the same body.

Ferocity. I idealize the way waves are violent yet gentle. How they are chaotic and unpredictable, yet rhythmic and beautiful in their morphology. I idealize the necessary violence in the dance between wind and water and how it seeks to deconstruct all that is of earth. I idealize the shapes that waves take in the collision against shore. I idealize the strength and persistence of waves that continue in the same rhythms whether illuminated or dark, whether warm or icy, whether now now now or eons ago. 

Sensitivity. I idealize the tides. I idealize the great salt-water sensitivity to the moon as this body of connected seas around our sphere-planet ebb and flood around the continents to follow the pull of the moon. I idealize water’s ability to form sensory organs with motion, in each swirl and ripple, that catalogue the cosmos of that moment. I idealize water’s properties of stagnation and preservation and its ability to provide life through movement and interaction. I idealize the generosity of water in how it is capable of filling the smallest gaps along a shoreline and the deepest trenches of the Pacific Ocean. I idealize its capacity to engulf all that enters it (except air which always pushes upwards to rejoin the sky).

“The paradoxes of life are all there in the sea. The ocean is often referred to as feminine, but the waves arrive in a masculine surge. As soon as they reach the full extent of their masculine expression, they shape themselves into a tube, a womb.”
– Ran Ortner in an interview in The Sun Magazine, June 2012

“In every language, then, the feminine ending was softer, more tender one might say, than that of the masculine.” (Proudhon via Bachelard 38)

water words that i know in portuguese:
wave – onda (f.)
sea – mar (m.)
ocean – oceano (m.)
crest – cume (m.)
tide – maré (f.)
flow – fluxo (m.)
moon – lua (f.)
sun – sol (m.)
wind – vento (m.)

Waves as words, the sea as androgyny.
Reverie on the word ‘ocean’:
a word that sounds like the sea:
ooooooooooosssssshhhhnnnnn

beginning with the whole, the o, the circle the feminine, the complete beginning and end, where life begins, began. Womb, the primordial sea, the beginnings of thoughts from the salt sea of consciousness and unconsciousness—the sea is circular, all water swirling, beginning and ending in spirals, circles, waves finding their form in curves.

O
oh
ohhhh
ooo-followed by a shhhh
the shhhh of waves retreating, dragging fingers and grasping on to pebbles, the erotic ebb and flow of lovers, earth and sea grasping, retreating surging, eroding, caressing, lapping, raging, flowing.
Shhhh: started by the crest of C, the crest of wave rushing forward, compelled by wind to earth. “there is always violence at the shore”
the transition from shhh to the deep resonance of nnnnnnn: nnnnn the masculine rush, the crest, the rise upwards, a latent sexual drive, the momentum of water energy, surge, to begin again. 

Oooooooooosssssshhhhhhhnnnnnnnnnnnn
Ocean as androgyny, the union of anima and animus.
The power and decisiveness of the animus in the dependence of the tides and the push of waves to change shorelines and to humble human spirits (we are small).
The lucidity and luminosity of anima in the reflectivity of sky on still water, light through water, in the circular forms of wave, vortex, spray. Gentle reminder to humans that though we are small, we are deep. And ancient. And fertile.

Wave as androgynous word:
push and peak of masculinity (violence, virility, strength)
curl and swirl of femininity (unity, compassion, flow)
ends as softer and more tender (but not without the history of the masculine surge)

Wave as orgasm, wave as creation:
The crest, peak, masculine surge to represent the hard work of contemplation, experimentation, observation, attention, patience, trial, immersion.
The tube, curve to represent unity of self and other, self and the world, the epiphany, empathy, distillation of the world into art, body and the distillation of self into the world.