The Sea Inside

to shore. Even on the dreariest days, the most forlorn afternoons, it’s never not beautiful here. The slow surging waves seem to be suppressed by the mist, yet every sense is heightened. I can smell the forest across the water. Sound behaves differently; with no buildings to bounce from, it spreads over the surface and soaks back into the sea.
    Black-headed gulls, barely more than pale smears, splash their heads and wings. Unresolved shapes drift by. Everything coalesces, caught in a dreamy, half-hallucinatory loop. There are shadows under the water as it withdraws over weed and rusty outfall pipes. A distant yacht becomes a silent white smudge. A fall of black crows scatter in the murk. The saturated greens and browns of grass and leaves turn the colour balance awry, in the way that reds and greens take on an eerie vividness before a storm, when the pressure appears to affect the light itself.
    My time is determined by the ebb and flow. At low tide, the beach is an indecent expanse laid bare by retreat, more like farmland than anything of the sea: an inundated field, almost peaty with sediment, as much charcoal as it is sludge.
    Bait-diggers leave little piles by their sides like slumped sandcastles. With their buckets and spades, they might as well be burying as disinterring, these sextons of the shore. Standing over them is an outfall marker in the shape of an X, which has turned to become a cross. In the uncertain light, the mud takes on new colours, from black to taupe and even a kind of rubbed silver.
    As I say, it is never not beautiful here.

    Behind me, bare oaks and beeches lie as cracks against the sky, evoking a peculiarly English landscape. In the late eighteenth century, Turner drew the abbey’s ruins in his sketchbook, tracing out the trees that had grown up around the crumbling gothic arches. In 1816 John Constable stayed at Netley on his honeymoon, and painted its scudding clouds and billowing greenery. Theirs were records of a Romantic setting, an alternative reality of sensation and emotion. Hanging over the shore, the gnarled, enamelled branches are made darker by the reflected light of the sea and the stretch of bright shingle. My shortening eyesight renders it all abstract, blurring the scene like Turner’s evocations of nothingness, with their vague shapes that might be waves or whales or slaves tossed overboard, rising and falling in foam with ‘a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it’, as Ishmael says in
Moby-Dick
, ‘until you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant’.

    That fixity of sea and sky is a supreme deception. Over it lies what Herman Melville called the ocean’s skin – a permeable membrane, one-sixteenth of a millimetre thick, fertile with particles and micro-organisms and contaminants; a fantastically fragile yet vast division. The horizon is only an invention of our eyes and brains as we seek to make sense of that immensity and locate our selves within it. The sea solicits such illusions. It takes its colour from the clouds, becomes a sky fallen to the earth; it only suggests what it might or might not contain. Little wonder that people once thought the sun sank into the sea, just as the moon rose out of it.
    Not many artists come here now to see the sun set or the moon rise. Netley’s beach is hardly thronged with easels, and Turner and Constable left long before the refinery turned the shore spiky with petro-chemical romance. Perhaps the strangest thing about this massed industry is its absence of sound, at least at this distance, both innocent and ominous at the same time, although occasionally the plant emits a dull indefinable roar, like a giant stirring in its sleep.
    This is a place both dead and alive. Being here, in or by the water, at either end of such a cold, closed-down day makes me physically part of it. A crested grebe pops up, charting the shallows for its prey. It arches its neck to dive again, as I swim towards it. A jumpy, almost nervous plunge, a little leap forward, then it’s gone.
    As with so many things about birds, you have to take a lot on trust; to discern what is real, and what they want you to believe. The pattern of a duck’s feathers, for instance, breaks up the surface, blurring its body between water and sky, an effect that prompted the American artist Abbott Thayer to suggest eye-dazzling camouflage for First World War