For much of my life I have lived by the water. In San Diego, I never was more than a fifteen minute drive from the ocean. The high school was even closer: a mere five minute walk to the cove; down a slight slope, right by the musuem of modern art, and the brilliant blue expanse of the Pacific ocean engages all your senses. Waves crash against the rocky cliffs every few seconds. The spray of salt water mist on your skin and hair. Seagulls scream at each other over perches and over food. And the unmistakable smell of drying kelp and decaying algae, and the occaisonal carcass and whatever human trash has washed ashore. The ocean coast smells like death yet nothing revitalizes me like sitting on the cliffs overlooking the shore, closing my eyes, and taking a deep breath.

On the other side of the country I’ve still managed to find a home by the water. Rising out of bed I open my eyes to boats drifting along the Hudson and the radiant summer sun. The river looks quite choppy outside. Perhaps I should pack a jacket for the wind today. I stand holding the kettle in my right hand, motionless, observing the trees and the surface of the water through the window, debating whether to make pourover coffee or an espresso. I often think, while dissociating by the coffe grinder, “it’s a shame the Hudson is so filthy.” In the afternoons when I walk home along the river I find that the sun is harsher than I remember and the breeze stronger than I remember. Walking by the water is my attempt to clear my mind and to observe my thoughts as they honk and curse at each other amidst the stop-and-go traffic of my mind, much more like the streets of Manhattan than the orderly chaos of southeast Asia. Yet, by the water, I always encounter the same thoughts. How lost I feel on this path I’ve walked hundreds of times. I request feedback. The report says that… hold on - it’s just blank. And that’s the loop. I refresh, I press the button again, I ask myself verbally and no passers-by look my way as I talk to myself along the Hudson. Maybe I’ve pressed the button so many times so compulsively that I’ve overloaded the internal workings of the Bureau that it’s just all gone up in flames.

For all of this proximity, I’ve spent little time in the water. The cold momentary sting when dipping into the pool always sends a shiver through my body. I always brace myself for the awkward slide off the pool deck into water just deep enough to submerge my heart. Liviing these sensations, the traffic comes to a halt. Pull. Breathe. Pull. Emerging from the water, indeed I feel reborn. The color of the sun beams through my view in its iridescent glory.

Each successive interrogation of the self comes at a cost. We are not fractal in nature. Each time you zoom in you lose detail. We chip off a piece of marble to get a closer look, to feel the weight in our hands. The fascinating density of it. Identifying another section of interest, we break off part of the sculpture to play with in our hands. We hold it to the sun, fascinated by the glint. So fixated I’ve become on these pieces I even built a bookshelf for their display. Proudly I stand in front of my collection, rationally sorted, beautiful in their classification. Finally, when clouds blanket the sky and rain torrents overhead does the shelf of marble lose it’s luster. Turning around it’s clear that what remains is a Stavrogin.

It’s thundering now and I’m afraid. I think of that time it was snowing in Montana. When you have nothing left, the music of the water will continue to sound, inviting you into its depths.