WEAVING / ON ‘GIVING THE SEA SALT ROCK’*
in memory of my grandfather, who passed away peacefully at home in November 2022
By the sea, then it’s going to be okay; by the sea, then there’s air and a constant sensation of change, no stagnation; by the sea is always better, it is where one gets better; by the sea these words write themselves.
The following text is an aquapoetic piece, where “aqua” is resonant with both the waters I encounter as collaborators, and process-lead modes of writing we/aving weaving together-apart (1), like ocean waves, the academic enquiry and the poetic exploration of the waters that we are and are in:
‘life flowing into life’ (2)...
Each paragraph is a wave in, and a wave out: it has neither a beginning, nor an end. While reading I invite you to put your analytical mind to one side, and to take in this text as you would sea air, attentively, one breath at a time.
As a child, and for a very long time, I could not believe that my tears were salty. Why, I wondered, would salt be here when it’s out there, in the ocean I met once? It’s not in our lake in the Urals, it’s a freshwater lake - my own ocean-being (3) was not yet accessible to me then; the salts are the ones holding us up, holding us whole.
The human body consists of roughly seventy-eight per cent water at the start of life, and only around forty-five towards its end. Watching an ageing body is watching the waters evaporate, slowly and relentlessly.
I have been referring to the process of gradual coming to terms with an end of a life before someone passes as pre-grieving. I’m sure there is a scientific or a medical term for it, or perhaps not, but naming it thus has made it possible for me to articulate, for myself and for others, those feelings that sweep me every now and then, as ocean waves on a stormy day, and they tumble you, and unless you find a place of calm within you, they will not let go.
My granddad is now 94 and I have not seen him since the beginning of 2019. I almost did not recognise him in a recent picture. He looks disoriented, like many elderly people do; his skin has lost its colour - the one that humans call “yellow” by reductive proxy; he is thinner and drier now. The waters are escaping his body.
Where do these waters evaporate to? In the midst of this ecological collapse we are reminded yet again and with a burning urgency that the amount of water on this planet has not changed since the Earth first became habitable (4), yet the amount of safe drinking water is constantly diminishing, not least by human design.
What is the sea without movement? Without the waves breathing, lapping, sweeping, nudging closer those that do not touch yet? I hear you wind, a stilling of all life is underway. Does my granddad’s drying, becoming a body of no water (5) make other water bodies possible?
Waking up with salty marks around my eyes, I know now the ocean is not a metaphor. She lives through the many beings we have the luck to share this planet with, albeit briefly. ‘We die and we do not die’ (6), writes Shunryu Suzuki, my invisible guide who has made for me ‘past time present’ (7).
To write this, I incorporeally return to the beach where I gave the sea salt rock not so long ago. This is a place where my own drawbacks - sensitivities of the bodily kind that permit an attuning to the very minutiae of smells, textures, sounds, are an advantage. And so I let the mind settle into the rolling of the waves, and the scent of seaweed floods the room. Why give the sea a piece of salt?
My white-passing body is a human ecotone (8), at tension with herself ≈ ‘one thing flows into another and cannot be grasped’ (9).
I often wonder whether the process of forgetting oneself, the process of memory deterioration could be understood as a necessary undoing, so that by the moment of death the mind of the dying doesn’t mind; that the loss of memory brings them closer to their true self, which is part of a whole, like the water in the waterfall in Suzuki’s story (10); a dissolving mind joining the larger whole, like that piece of rock salt I gave to the sea.
The shores of our - where “our” indicates not a possession but a belonging - the shores of our lake Talkas are not what they used to be. I make a note to ask granddad about the meaning of the lake’s name, although it is in Bashkir language and not in Tatar, so there is a chance he won’t know. Now he won’t know, his mind almost entirely evaporated. Talkas is a freshwater lake formed within the mountain range in place of an ancient coral sea, his waters always, always cold, and crisp, and so clean it is still, today, used as a source of fresh water by the villagers nearby (one rides a horse and cart into the lake and while the stallion drinks the rider fills up the barrel). The shores of our lake Talkas are empty, worn, and tired.
Any time I make a linguistic comparison I am reminded of Astrida Neimanis’ words (11) that it too is a kind of violence. So let me rephrase myself: a dissolving mind joining the larger whole, as that piece of salt rock joined the sea while I held it, gently, in my hand: one thing flowed into another, it was not to be grasp but to cradle.
How glad the salts must be to be whole again.
Overuse and tread exacerbated by the desire that seems to belong to so many humans worldwide - to possess a piece of the shore, of the ocean, of the beach, to take something that needs to stay put in order to continue to be, is the cause. How many times have I taken a rock or a pebble from the beach? I recall seeing a bunch of glistening - fascinating! rocks and minerals at the neighbours’ flat when I was around six years old, around the time and place I directed my first play - why must we have them? As other extractivist trends these practices are habits well engrained and are hard to let go of.
I resolve to let them be, and to return - to give back, as and when I can, a rock or a shell any time that I visit a beach, only to find myself in a strange new place with few of my former possessions. Weeks later, a panic attack overcome, I gather some kind of strength and take myself to the beach for a Biennale opening (12).
I cannot see a rock I would be happy to let go of (to let go, what a gift), and so I pack a piece of pink ‘Himalayan’ rock salt I pick out of my lamp, which, unusually, is made up of a metal basket filled with a few handfuls of these rocks - offcuts, I think to myself; this is the pink salt that is rumoured to have magical properties and air cleansing powers (I get dressed all the while wondering just how damaging is the practice of extraction of these salts, and what is my role and place within it for making such a purchase - an enquiry to come back to more closely at another time perhaps).
An otherly-abled body, mine comes up against the concrete soils (13) struggling to navigate the way to the sea. As my body rests having reached the waters, other bodies are awaiting a rise in the tide anticipating shared buoyancy.
If you are not already here, how can you be born? (14), Suzuki continues to resonate on my mind. In my pre-grieving moments I recall his words: ‘How very glad the water must be to come back to the original river! If this is so, what feeling will we have when we die?’ (15) What feeling must this salt rock have in joining the ocean, her salts, once again? Disappearing right before my eyes directed strictly downward in keeping focus on the camera screen, salt rock being swept out of my hand every other wave - I held onto it, but not too tight; all else became secondary, only the rock, the ocean, and their play together mattered in that moment; intra-tidal.
I resist revisiting the sea to write: I know the place, what more could I know? Yesterday my body was suddenly drawn to a hold of chlorinated water, and I was awash with a strange sense of nostalgia. I felt overwhelmed by the feelings of sorrow for that piece of salt: it dissolved and disappeared right before my eyes that now begin to swell again and let out tiny streams of diluted (16) compassion. ‘Our problems should be solved or dissolved in this life’ (17).
The ability to let go is what I seek to practice; the line between holding and grasping onto the salt was as thin as are the pen marks on paper on which these words were first written (18); and the yet- impossible letting go of a person whose life has all but evaporated into other lives, and the letting go of the mind, and the letting go of possessions, something - anything, and instead practicing belonging, is as hard as rock can be.
At night, the sea air enters my room: I fill my belly full, my lungs full, my chest full, my body full: exhale; as tiny bubbles bustling playing tugging with the pebbles on the shore, emotions bristle and compete for attention - I put them down, still them, return them to sea; ‘from the smallest to the biggest’ (19), that is how we live, that is how the sea moves us.
Today my granddad’s hands are colder, reminiscent of the coolness of soils on an early autumn’s day. His mind has stayed present just long enough. Now letting go of itself, it has become even closer to ‘the unfolding of big mind’ (20), his thoughts - more salty, fluid, and inaccessible to those of us remaining on the cerebral side of this world.
To be unapologetically vulnerable to grief feels freeing. When I look up from my camera, and figure out how to move my body again after being fixed, like a tripod, for a while, everything has changed: salt rock has disappeared, relieved and released from its captive form; and the air feels different somehow.
Olga F. Koroleva, October 2022 .
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* Olga F. Koroleva, on giving the sea salt rock, single-screen moving image, 6mins 46secs, 2022, available at https://ocean-archive.org/view/2711.
(1) “Keynote: Karen Barad,” Art Museum at the University of Toronto, online talk, 28 September 2022, https://artmuseum.utoronto.ca/program/keynote-karen-barad.
(2) Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Democracy of Species (London: Penguin Books Ltd., 2021), 62.
(3) ‘We sweat and cry salt water, so we know that the ocean is really in our blood,’ Teresia Teaiwa quoted in Epeli Hau’ofa, “The Ocean In Us,” The Contemporary Pacific, Vol. 10, No. 2 (FALL 1998), pp. 392-410, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23706895.
(4) Lovelock writes: ‘There is evidence that over the past three and a half aeons, while the continents formed and drifted about the globe, the polar ice melted and refroze, and the sea level rose and fell, the total volume of water has remained unchanged, despite the metamorphoses.’ James Lovelock, Gaia A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 78.
(5) Referencing Astrida Neimanis’ work on bodies and bodies of water, only rephrasing to say that an elderly body is in the process becoming ‘a body of no water’ due to ageing. Astrida Neimanis, “Becoming a body of water,” Undutiful Daughters. New Directions in Feminist Thought and Practice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 85.
(6) Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (New York and Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1970), 25.
(7) Shunryu Suzuki, ibid, 33. (8) Astrida Neimanis, ibid, 93. (9) Shunryu Suzuki, ibid, 137. (10) Shunryu Suzuki, ibid, 92-95.
(11) ‘Analogies and equivalences are their own kind of violence’ in the context of ‘the invisibility and pervasiveness of weather as anti-blackness’. Astrida Neimanis, “The Sea and the Breathing”, e-flux Architecture, published May 2020, https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/oceans/331869/the-sea-and- the-breathing.
(12) Whitstable Biennale 2022. (13) Olga Koroleva, Soft Forest, 2021, www.olgakoroleva.com/docs/Soft_Forest.pdf. (14) Shunryu Suzuki, ibid, 61. (15) Shunryu Suzuki, ibid, 94.
(16) ‘At present, the salt content of the sea expressed as a percentage (the number of parts by weight of salt in one hundred parts of water) is about 3.4 per cent, while that of our blood is about 0.8 per cent. ‘ James Lovelock, ibid, 80.
(17) Shunryu Suzuki, ibid, 67.
(18) Rephrasing Lovelock, Lovelock writes: ‘If we were to model the Earth by a globe 30 centimetres in diameter, the average depth of the sea would be little more than the thickness of the paper on which these words are printed, while the deepest trench would be represented by a dent of one-third of a millimetre.’ James Lovelock, ibid, 79.
(19) Shi Heng Yi, 内功 [nèigōng] Theory "Smallest to biggest”, 2020, https://www.shihengyi.online/view/courses/neigong-theory-from-the-smallest-to-the-biggest- streaming/146584-default-section/434391-neigong-theory-smallest-to-biggest-mp4 (requires free registration).
(20) Suzuki calls our calm, serene mind the big mind, that which is unbothered ‘by anything’ . Speculatively, I propose that a dying mind, instead of the overwhelming understanding as an impairment, is close to serene mind, and thus to big mind. ‘We must make some effort, but we must forget ourselves in the effort we make. In this realm there is no subjectivity or objectivity. Our mind is just calm, without even any awareness. In this unawareness, every effort and every idea and thought will vanish.’ Shunryu Suzuki, ibid, 36-37, 93-94.
