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Excerpt from Alan Watt's Cloud-Hidden, "Whereabouts Unknown"
Alan Watts (6th January 1915–16th November 1973), British author, speaker and philosopher and who held both a master’s degree in theology and a doctorate of divinity, divided the final years of his life between a ferryboat on the Sausalito waterfront and an isolated cottage in the foothills of the mountain, part of the Druid Heights artist community, where he would spend many hours writing and consolidating his thoughts.
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Video : Footage of seas I've visited in the UK, Spain, Portugal, Greece and Mexico
Music :Marcus Viana
Website:
Narration : Allan Watts from Cloud-Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown
Excerpt:
April 1970
Ever since I can remember anything at all, the light, the smell, the sound and motion of the sea have been pure magic. Even the mere imitation of its presence—gulls flying a little way inland, the quality of light in the sky beyond the hills which screen it from view, the lowing of foghorns in the night. If ever I have to get away from it all, and in the words of the Chinese poet “wash all the wrongs of life from my pores”, there is simply nothing better than to climb out onto a rock and sit for hours with nothing in sight but sea and sky. Although the rhythm of the waves beats a kind of time, it is not clock or calendar time. It has no urgency. It happens to be timeless time. I know that I am listening to a rhythm which has been just the same for millions of years and it takes me out of a world of relentlessly ticking clocks. Clocks for some reason or other always seem to be marching and, as with armies, marching is never to anything but doom. But in the motion of waves, there is no marching rhythm. It harmonizes with our very breathing. It does not count our days. Its pulse is not in the stingy spirit of measuring, of marking out how much still remains. It is the breathing of eternity, like the God Brahma of Indian mythology inhaling and exhaling, manifesting and dissolving the worlds, forever. As a mere conception, this might sound appallingly monotonous, until you come to listen to the breaking and washing of waves.
Thus, I have come to live right on the edge of the water. I have a studio, library, a place for writing on an old ferryboat tied up on the waterfront of Sausalito, north of San Francisco. I suppose this place is the nearest thing in America to a Mediterranean fishing village. Steep hills clustered with little houses and below along the rim of the bay a forest of masts rocking almost imperceptibly against a background of water and wooded promontories. In some ways, this is a rather messy waterfront, not just piers and boats, but junkyards, industrial buildings and all the inevitable “litterature” of our culture. But somehow the land-and-seascape absorbs and pacifies the mess. Sheds and shacks thrown together out of old timbers and plywood, heaps of disused lumber, rusted machinery and rotting hulls—all of this is transformed in the beneficent presence of the sea.
Perhaps it is the quality of the light, especially early in the morning and towards evening, when the distinction between sky and water becomes uncertain when the whole of space becomes opalescent in a sort of pearly luminous grey and when the rising or setting moon is straw yellow. In this light, all the rambling mess of sheds and junkyards is magical, blessed with the patterns of masts and ropes and boats at anchor. It all puts me in mind of landfalls a long way off and all the voyages one has dreamed of.
—Alan Watts, “The Water”, Cloud-Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown
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