Learnings from sojourn in sea

Three days and two nights on a sailboat brought me closer to trusting my body and having faith in its ability to discern the right gestures

I woke up discombobulated. Despite knowing I was secure in my bed on the third floor of the apartment building in Venice I had the sensation of the world around me being afloat. I’m calling it the ‘Persistence of Motion’. I spent three days and two nights on a sailboat drifting along the western coast of Sardinia. My body has since dissolved the difference between land and water and I still have within me the feeling of a certain buoyancy, like I am nestled within the interstitial moment of waviness, a back and forth that makes my body feel solid and liquid all at once. Our skipper, Luigi, had forewarned me. He said I’d be more likely to experience this in closed spaces and I’d been anticipating it as much as I had been anticipating being back on the shore. And yet, when I finally did register the non-movement, I was surprised by it. I had just entered the hotel room I was sharing with my co-mentor at Torregrande, the beach of Oristano, in Sardinia. My feet stood securely on the floor and yet I was moving invisibly, without actually making any gesture of movement, as if the sea was continuing to administer my body’s sense of space and time and fixity. The next time such a wave came over me was when I was seated, an hour later, at dinner, then again while I was brushing my teeth. Two days after having disembarked, I feel I am still at sea.

As glamorous as it sounds to say, I went sailing as part of a field trip organised by the Sardinian film commission to allow the fellows and mentors of the TBA 21 Ocean Space fellowship to ‘location scout’, this adventure was one of the most difficult things I’ve done in my adult life. While I’ve been sailing before, it’s always been for a couple of hours after which I have been returned to the safety of the shore. It’s something else to spend the night on a boat, and my first night was filled with anxiety. I stupidly didn’t realise I could have opened a second window and fell asleep without access to sufficient ventilation. I woke up at 3am in a state of panic. I felt claustrophobic and knew I had to exit my room. I walked up to the deck and sat on a bench in the comforting presence of two sleeping fellows. I had begun to count the hours until we would return to land, an indication of my body’s descent into strategising coping mechanisms, survival modes. So, instead, I took a series of deep breaths and gazed at the sparkling night sky and the stunning view of large hill-sized rocks that lay in my immediate field of vision. Then I began to align my body with the movement underneath my feet, the swaying waves. I told myself it was like a script, you begin a sentence from one side until you reach the other, then continue between ends; or like sewing, or crochet, or making lace. This was a movement inscribed within nature, a repetitious back-and-forth and I had to invite my body to dwell within it, let it be nestled by the same gravitational pull that dictated the flow of currents and tides. This form of self-soothing helped. I was able to return to bed and fall asleep. I was infinitely better then onwards.

It is almost delicious now, when the feeling returns. Because I know it is ephemeral and it will disappear once my body has reacclimatised itself to land. It felt auspicious to return to the watery context of Venice after having spent these days navigating the sea, observing land from the perspective of one who can see the coastlines, a kind of reversal of normative being. Although I had felt motivated to finally confront, head-on, my fear of the boundlessness of the sea, my body wasn’t ready. I delighted in watching my colleagues dive into the emerald green waters but found I was not able to join. Instead, when, on our last day, we paused at the Isola di Mal di Ventre, which literally translates to the island of a stomach ache, I let my body play in water. I floated backwards and forwards, I practised various ways of staying afloat. I wore my swimming goggles and observed fish and other flora and surveyed how the sunlight filtered through the bottom of the Mediterranean sea. I felt deep joy, like I was being rewarded for my persistence.

The whole experience was deeply transformative in an immersive, personal way. I experienced my body so differently and had to reconfigure and realign it to different complexities. I still have a lot to learn about how to hold myself within water and underneath it; how to trust my body, have faith in its ability to discern the right gestures. But I’m getting closer. One day soon… 

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx

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