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Another Mid-Atlantic Story (2-10-96) by Stuart Moulthrop 
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Our differences, almost-correspondences the one as against the other, mother stories and in my stubborn difference, a father story; your water and my water: for me not the Estuary (though it's in my blood and memory also) but the Atlantic -- "down'e'ocean," as my people say... When I was about four years old my father put me on his shoulders and took me wading in the surf; it was not my idea. Ocean was his element: he could float in ten inches of salt water. I sink like a stone. So I rode his shoulders howling and screaming, because this was a wonderful scary thing and I had never done anything like it before. I would later learn (from my father's brothers, so consider the source) that their father had taught his sons to swim by turning them out of a boat in the middle of an Adirondack lake. And though my father was a much more gentle man, there was something hard and necessary in the surf ride he gave me -- the point being to free the child from fear by carrying him through it -- though of course that wasn't really the point, nor can anyone be made free by carrying. I could learn, though, and I did learn about the ocean, image of the limitless for me then and even now I've been across it, image of the Terrible New Thing, even though we know in our flesh that it is the oldest, oldest thing. The rush of the surf, the terror of the new; what the body knows and what the mind imagines. This is not a story about "cyberspace" (a word I don't like), though that is in its own way a sea of stories. For me, ocean and estuary are memory and experience, dream and "buzz-daze," the pass and return of language and commitment. "We dream our future by incremental passes," Carolyn Guyer says. Dreams are tidal phenomena, I think, moved by the moon and the waters we carry inside us. We dream our future in ebb and flow and in those ebbing and recessing dreams, dreams of a new culture, we are always also dreaming of the past. |
