no line on the horizon II

Isle of Skye 2012 ... the sea is there

I know that I have written about this before, but I must return. No line on the horizon. If I were a photographer, I think that my life's work would be of such lines. I think that to best describe myself is to compare me to a line on the horizon ... the blend of elements, airy and powerful, of the sky and the sea. If I could live squint eyed, which gives the effect of this blend, I think that I would, but I am likely to bump into things more if I did ... I suppose it isn't practical. But conceptually, I can blend. Life is not black and white, at best it is gray, and more likely blurred, having the presence of all elements, and all colors.

So why again? I was singing to a friend and he said, 'oh! that's gross.' Oh, not my singing, but what I was singing ... 'I know a girl who's like a sea/ I watch her changing everyday for me, oh yeah/ One day she's still, the next she swells/ You can hear the universe in her sea shells, oh yeah.'

Oh Bono ... the Irish are pulled to the sea, captivated by it. As I've said before, when I first bought U2's last album,  No Line On The Horizon, I wore out this song, which is the first track on the album. The idea of it is so sensual ... I'm lucky that though I do not live near to a sea, I am able to travel to one. Every time that I am in the water, I feel its power ... its swell. The sea is as alive even when it is still. It constantly breathes. And to be in it, heavier than air, I can feel its pulse. Its rhythm.

Of the song, I love the line, 'you can hear the universe in her sea shells.' Any one who gathers shells along a shore knows to listen for the sound of the sea in its shells. Of course the shell is also representative of a woman, it's shell pink and pearly interior ... and in coupling, the union, the universe is heard. That blend, of man to woman, for him, is line-less, one. What's sexier than that?

The song goes on ... 'I know a girl with a hole in her heart/ She said infinity is a great place to start/
She said "Time is irrelevant, it's not linear"/ Then she put her tongue in my ear.' So we move on to the universe and its horizon ... infinite time. The idea that time is not linear is brilliant. How can time be a straight line? I know that when I am in time, it is not a minute or an hour, it's the absence of those constraints and it becomes ... living. The most tortuous device ever made by man is the clock. When the clock is there ... we're boxed. Tied in. Constrained. Shackled. Oh, I realize that the telling of time is necessary for day to day life, but I also think that it is essential to have moments when time is the horizon ... it is not one or the other, an hour or a second ... it is absorption.

And in a moment of absorption, what better thing than a tongue in one's ear ... or something like it.