Almost half a century after his death, Alan Watts continues to move readers through a 1960 lecture titled “Love of Waters,” which The Marginalian now highlights. The talk was included in the posthumous collection Zen Rascal and was written in Watts’s studio: a floating library aboard an old ferry moored on the Sausalito waterfront, just north of San Francisco. There, he turns to the ocean as more than a backdrop, using it as a way to think about time, consciousness, and what it means to be alive.
The article begins with a long evolutionary arc. Four billion years ago, it notes, the chemistry in hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor trembled with the promise of consciousness, and matter began its long metabolic journey toward mind. It suggests that our salty cells may remember how life emerged from tidal pools, climbed into the trees, and then descended to live beneath a canopy of synapses animated by the “oceanic longing” to make sense of mortality. Rachel Carson appears as a kindred witness: looking out at the open ocean, she wrote, we may feel a tentative sense of a universal truth lying just beyond our perception.
For Watts, the rhythm of the waves belongs to another order of time. It beats, but it is neither clock time nor calendar time; it is in no hurry. Because this rhythm has remained the same for millions of years, it takes us out of the world of “relentlessly ticking clocks.” Clocks, he observes, always seem to be marching, and armies march only toward destruction. The movement of the waves neither counts our days nor weighs what remains. It falls into step with breathing and becomes, as he puts it, “the breath of eternity,” like Brahma in Indian mythology, endlessly breathing worlds in and out.
Watts also describes how civilization’s waste and deprivation are transformed within what he calls “the beneficent presence of the sea.” Early in the morning and toward evening, when sky and water become indistinct and space takes on an opalescent appearance, the cluttered chaos of sheds and junk shops becomes magical. The white cries of gulls and the patterns of masts, ropes, and moored boats bring distant harbors and dream voyages to his mind. This is a poetic dimension, but Watts insists that it does not cancel out the ocean’s harsher reality.
The paradox, as he presents it, is that beneath the luminous surface lies “the dark business of predation”: humans and birds against fish, fish against fish. Life continues through the painful transformation of one form into another. The gull is no plunderer, he writes, because being alive is the same thing as eating crabs. Seabirds are transformations of fish; humans are transformations of wheat, chickens, and cattle. The love of food is the agony of food. To object to the inseparability of pleasure and pain, life and death, is to object to existence itself—although he admits that we cannot help reacting when the time comes, because the objection to pain is pain.
This leads Watts to the cost of human self-awareness. The human animal can stand outside itself and comment on life, but in doing so it has exiled itself from life and found it alien. He plays with words: perhaps we must object to whatever becomes an object. Could we instead “submit to life” rather than object to it? Fish and gulls do not philosophize; they show no sign of finding their existence problematic and do not lecture one another about duties or the afterlife. For Watts, our mistake—the fall of man—is that we regard the additional circuit of consciousness, the part that knows it knows, as our essential self.
He compares self-awareness to the opposition of thumb and forefinger. They are distinct, but not separate; the thumb does not float in the air beside the hand. They join at their roots, just as at our roots we are joined to the whole underlying subject of nature. The problem, he argues, is that our consciousness has become too superficial, as though all sensation were in the fingertips rather than the palm. Our comments on life are not balanced by a clear sense of what we are. If we were as far removed spatially from Earth as one atom in an orange is from another, he writes, we would be somewhere out near the Moon.
Watts concludes with an answer to Cartesian abstraction: nature is not a vast abstraction, just as an orange is not an abstraction from its molecules. That is why he loves the ocean. It is, he says, the hardest part of nature to destroy with the emblems and symptoms of disconnected human consciousness. It is an environment where awareness of our roots can awaken, and where space—made real by light and color—can be seen to join things rather than separate them. His final discovery is personal: the pounding on the wall of space and consciousness was his own heart.
Comments