The gentle sound of the surf fills the soul.
No frequency left untouched. But never colouring outside the lines; never too loud.
It occupies the senses and allows detachment without dissociation. It lifts the mind just a fraction, a gliding ballroom aquaplane through thoughts – an environmentally stimulated free association.
The cricket ground in north London, Lord’s, the home of cricket, is genteel and perhaps not as shallow as other sports stadiums but shallower certainly than, say, the Gabba in Brisbane which is a bowl-like colosseum.
The ambience is known as the Lord’s hum, and like the waves on the shore it is fractionally hypnotising, a tonic that takes you out of the day to day and allows you to focus without concentrating and idle without becoming bored.
What better argument that humans used to be shore-dwelling fisher-folk, paddling the shores, browsing the rock pools, and gazing out to sea? A happy place.
Likewise: golf maybe? The low, rolling green grass, lush with life; trees to find animals to hunt and lakes for water. Looking out from the clubhouse, the links landscape must tug something ancient: we could live here.
I visited a swannery a few years back, 600 swans nesting and living wing to wing.
It’s uncanny to meander through the trees zig-zagging between nest after nest, and an actually a little alarming to see hundreds all together, synchronously bobbing on the inlet. (The swannery is on the coast.) Those alien eyes, the last dinosaurs.
I don’t know how the swanherd monks who established the swannery 700 years ago enticed these famously solitary birds to pack so closely.
But I wouldn’t be surprised if it were to do with the lapping waves on the shoreline.
The sound packs us in wool and allows us to pack together. Here on the sunbed I can hear people speaking a few meters away only as a murmur, and my family right next to me - who are reading, right now - when they speak, as clear as day.
What an advantage for a beach society of early humans, to live closely without stepping on each other’s toes.
Watching a fire, too, fills the eyes and releases the imagination to drift.
The flicker tells us stories. Not like the high-fructose corn syrup flicker of video which similarly draws us in but then submerges us. Flames leave space for our own personality and thoughts.
Or ASMR (previously), which replicates the surf but, like television drowns the self.
No, the back and forth of the waves is more homely hearth than YouTube; more cloud-gazing than TV.
Cloud-gazing being another ancient occupation that occupies without overwhelming.
How kind that keeping a watch on the weather should be so pleasant.
And yet another is stone-knapping. Watch a young kid pick up and crack two toys together, before they can speak even, feeling the heft in their hands, turning and smacking, turning and rapping, and you get an idea that these were the jobs of all of us for a million years, our brains contoured to quietly enjoy time spent in the practice of these vital activities, tumbled and smoothed on the riverbed of deep time.
Memories of the Pleistocene.
Language too.
Before we fished the shallows we were tree-dwellers.
Arboreal animals ascending trunks, branching out ever more precariously – before taking a leap – grabbing hold and working back to sure safety close in with another tree. Or flying through the canopy, branch after branch after branch after –
And doesn’t that sound like language, or rather whatever principle it is that underpins language and metaphor and science, or whatever model of the world it is that we hold inside us to understand it?
A load-bearing fossil of the ancestral forest every time we grasp for a word and reach out for a new idea.
Venturing out from one’s home tree… spying a leaf of a particular shape, generalising to the fruit of that tree, bringing to mind that harvest and everything it would mean, moving from bud to branch to trunk to whatever ur-trunk it is inside and beyond the specific tree, the ur-tree of that species, the Platonic type, and we become apes that are natural philosophers.
Broca’s area biologists, flying along chains of branching and leaf tip-interconnected concepts, making a leap from the final branch - a flight of fancy - across open air to somewhere new.
Even before we carried the trees in our brains we took the billion-years-ago proto-ocean in our blood and our cells.
We came onto the land and carried the salty sea with us in our bodies, delicate parcels wrapped with cell membranes, and the swell and the wash remembered with each beat of our hearts, the dark ocean that was once our home still inside us, rocking us in its invisible waves.
I can hear it, across a billion years of history, inside me, and across a short stretch of beach, under this bright blue sky and this square red beach umbrella, hot sun drying the sand on my feet, the lapping of the waves on the shore, the sea in my blood and my ears. It fills us.
The gentle sound of the surf fills the soul.
No frequency left untouched. But never colouring outside the lines; never too loud.
It occupies the senses and allows detachment without dissociation. It lifts the mind just a fraction, a gliding ballroom aquaplane through thoughts – an environmentally stimulated free association.
The cricket ground in north London, Lord’s, the home of cricket, is genteel and perhaps not as shallow as other sports stadiums but shallower certainly than, say, the Gabba in Brisbane which is a bowl-like colosseum.
The ambience is known as the Lord’s hum, and like the waves on the shore it is fractionally hypnotising, a tonic that takes you out of the day to day and allows you to focus without concentrating and idle without becoming bored.
What better argument that humans used to be shore-dwelling fisher-folk, paddling the shores, browsing the rock pools, and gazing out to sea? A happy place.
Likewise: golf maybe? The low, rolling green grass, lush with life; trees to find animals to hunt and lakes for water. Looking out from the clubhouse, the links landscape must tug something ancient: we could live here.
I visited a swannery a few years back, 600 swans nesting and living wing to wing.
It’s uncanny to meander through the trees zig-zagging between nest after nest, and an actually a little alarming to see hundreds all together, synchronously bobbing on the inlet. (The swannery is on the coast.) Those alien eyes, the last dinosaurs.
I don’t know how the swanherd monks who established the swannery 700 years ago enticed these famously solitary birds to pack so closely.
But I wouldn’t be surprised if it were to do with the lapping waves on the shoreline.
The sound packs us in wool and allows us to pack together. Here on the sunbed I can hear people speaking a few meters away only as a murmur, and my family right next to me - who are reading, right now - when they speak, as clear as day.
What an advantage for a beach society of early humans, to live closely without stepping on each other’s toes.
Watching a fire, too, fills the eyes and releases the imagination to drift.
The flicker tells us stories. Not like the high-fructose corn syrup flicker of video which similarly draws us in but then submerges us. Flames leave space for our own personality and thoughts.
Or ASMR (previously), which replicates the surf but, like television drowns the self.
No, the back and forth of the waves is more homely hearth than YouTube; more cloud-gazing than TV.
Cloud-gazing being another ancient occupation that occupies without overwhelming.
How kind that keeping a watch on the weather should be so pleasant.
And yet another is stone-knapping. Watch a young kid pick up and crack two toys together, before they can speak even, feeling the heft in their hands, turning and smacking, turning and rapping, and you get an idea that these were the jobs of all of us for a million years, our brains contoured to quietly enjoy time spent in the practice of these vital activities, tumbled and smoothed on the riverbed of deep time.
Memories of the Pleistocene.
Language too.
Before we fished the shallows we were tree-dwellers.
Arboreal animals ascending trunks, branching out ever more precariously – before taking a leap – grabbing hold and working back to sure safety close in with another tree. Or flying through the canopy, branch after branch after branch after –
And doesn’t that sound like language, or rather whatever principle it is that underpins language and metaphor and science, or whatever model of the world it is that we hold inside us to understand it?
A load-bearing fossil of the ancestral forest every time we grasp for a word and reach out for a new idea.
Venturing out from one’s home tree… spying a leaf of a particular shape, generalising to the fruit of that tree, bringing to mind that harvest and everything it would mean, moving from bud to branch to trunk to whatever ur-trunk it is inside and beyond the specific tree, the ur-tree of that species, the Platonic type, and we become apes that are natural philosophers.
Broca’s area biologists, flying along chains of branching and leaf tip-interconnected concepts, making a leap from the final branch - a flight of fancy - across open air to somewhere new.
Even before we carried the trees in our brains we took the billion-years-ago proto-ocean in our blood and our cells.
We came onto the land and carried the salty sea with us in our bodies, delicate parcels wrapped with cell membranes, and the swell and the wash remembered with each beat of our hearts, the dark ocean that was once our home still inside us, rocking us in its invisible waves.
I can hear it, across a billion years of history, inside me, and across a short stretch of beach, under this bright blue sky and this square red beach umbrella, hot sun drying the sand on my feet, the lapping of the waves on the shore, the sea in my blood and my ears. It fills us.