What the Waves Know That the Clocks Forgot

Alan Watts kept a floating library — an old ferryboat tied to the waterfront in Sausalito. It was there, in 1960, that he gave a talk called "Love of Waters," and it opens with something you can feel in your own chest the moment you read it.

Listen to waves long enough, Watts noticed, and you fall out of ordinary time. The rhythm keeps a kind of time, sure — but not clock time, not calendar time. There's no urgency in it. You're hearing a beat that has stayed exactly the same for millions of years, and it takes you out of the world of relentlessly ticking clocks.

Clocks, for some reason or other, always seem to be marching, and armies never march to anything but doom. But there's no marching rhythm in the motion of waves. It harmonizes with the breath. It does not count our days.

Clock time is stingy — it exists to measure how much is left. Wave time doesn't count anything. Watts called it "the breathing of eternity." As a mere concept, that sounds appalling, monotonous, cold. But then you actually listen to the waves breaking and washing, and the concept becomes the most consoling sound in the world.

Here's the part where Watts refuses to lie to you. The ocean is not only beauty — spray and driftwood and space so luminous your imagination can walk into it forever. Under the surface of both sky and water is the grim business of preying. Birds against fish, fish against fish, one form of life painfully transformed into another so the next can keep going.

The gull isn't rapacious or greedy. It's just that his being alive at all is the same thing as eating crabs. Sea birds are transformations of fish. Men are transformations of wheat, chickens, and steers. And a love for the food is the agony of the food.

To object to this — to the way pleasure and pain, life and death are stitched into a single fabric — is simply to object to existence itself. And yet, Watts admits, we cannot help objecting when our own time comes. "Objecting to pain is pain."

But watch what he does with that word. Object. We object to the world — and everything we object to, we turn into an object, something set apart from us, alien, over there. And here is his beautiful, mischievous question: what if we could subject to life instead of object to it? Treat it not as a thing we stand outside and criticize, but as the very thing we are made of and speak from — the way you'd speak of the subject you love, the subject you're studying?

The gulls don't have this problem. They don't philosophize about whether life is good on the whole or bad on the whole. They swing and go on living right up until the game is no longer worth the candle, and they don't lecture each other about their duties or fret about where they go when they die. That we do all of this is the price of consciousness — our one extra circuit, the part that knows that it knows.

And this is where Watts locates what he only half-jokingly calls the fall of man. It isn't the extra circuit itself. It's the mistake we made about it. We assumed that the part of us able to comment on life is our essential self — that "I" am the commentator, the watcher, the one standing apart. We put our whole identity on the side of the critic in the balcony and forgot he's just an instrument, a small subordinate part of a much larger being.

He offers the loveliest image for this. Think of the finger and thumb of your hand. They oppose each other — that opposition is exactly what makes the hand useful. But which one is you? The thumb isn't floating in the air alongside the rest of the hand. At the root, they're joined.

This is a difference which does not divide. And at our roots we are joined to the whole subject of nature.

You might protest that "nature" is just a big abstraction — but is an orange just an abstraction of its molecules? Our real trouble, Watts thought, is that our consciousness has crept out to the fingertips. All our sensation, all our sense of self, seems to live in the tips of the fingers and not in the palm. We've mistaken the commentary for the life.

Which is why the ocean does what it does to us. It's not offering an escape from time or death — it holds both of those in plain view. What it offers is a reminder, older than any clock, that the watcher and the watched were never really two things. We didn't wander in from somewhere else to observe the sea. We are, quite literally, transformations of it — saline creatures who crawled out of the tide pools and never stopped being made of that same water. To sit and listen is not to leave the world behind. It's to be returned, for a moment, to the palm.

Distilled from The Marginalian