This afternoon I went snorkelling for the first time in my life.
I’ve never done it before, because I was scared, but not in the way you think. Yes there’s the obvious - I am not good at following instruction so I assumed I would inhale water through the mask (I didn’t). The real reason I’ve always avoided snorkelling is the same reason I don’t want to watch an episode of Black Mirror or ever try acid: I have a mental health diagnosis. I have been in a mental hospital. It’s very long ago and far away - decades ago - but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. If ever there were a trap door through which to fall back into chaos, it would be acid, an episode of Black Mirror or looking straight into the ocean. I don’t need my mind expanded, I need it compressed under a weighted blanket, so it can rest easier.
On Zuma beach in Malibu, as a twelve year old, I was sucked out by the undertow, tumbling, beaten and breathless, until a surfer rescued me. That feeling I had of “This is it, I am never getting back to land” I get echoes of now and then when absorbing art, sometimes a painting or book but more often a movie. Watching ‘Triangle of Sadness’, gripping the cinema seat in front of me, I did pray as I had when caught in the rip tide, that when the credits came up, my delirium would subside and I would get to be myself again.
But we are in The Azores, a Portuguese settled volcanic archipelago half way to the east coat of America. And this is our last week ever with Lucia, who has watched my daughter four hours a day, four days a week for five years. We knew she was the one for us when my entire gathered family was flapping around a garden, freaking out about a wasp that kept landing near us. Lucia, who is an Italian Grandmother, arrived and went and sat where we were too nervous to sit, announcing “I am not eenterested in the wasp”. I knew I needed that energy in my and my daughter’s life, that weighted blanket of a personality.
I can’t afford child care anymore, not for now (an essay on middle class broke-ness as opposed to being “poor” maybe next time). So I am easing us out with a holiday I purchased when money was no object (okay, not no object but when I wasn’t worrying about how to pay for child care). I paid for this holiday so long ago, I forgot about it until the email reminder popped up, a gift of an echo from a previous standard of living.
Thankfully, groceries in the Azores are cheap and the apartment we rented had a kitchen and fridge and is across the street from a natural saltwater swimming pool formed within the volcanic rock.
Though everyone is Catholic, a lot of people here descended from Jews fleeing mainland Portugal during the inquisition that began in 1536 (having fled to Portugal from the Spanish Inquisition, only to be hit with the next round of persecution and flight).
In Lagoa, where we stayed, there is no beach, no sand, only ladders or ropes attached to rocks. Lucia wants me to come snorkel with her and I try to put her off with suspicions about jellyfish.
“I am not interested in the jellyfish” she shrugs.
Really?
“If I get unlucky,” she says, “then I will deal”. Italians are kind of like Jews but also very much not like us.
And because we will be parting and we love her, I do it to make her happy. The secret reality of peer pressure is that it can sometimes lead to great spiritual breakthrough. Think back through your life and you’ll find occasional times it’s actually brought you good rather than regret.
Before descending, I saw a jellyfish, translucent as the bubble gum balloon my kid had puffed at me on the plane. The water absolutely clear, I looked at the creature from the bridge before I got in, internally pleading: “You are beautiful, you are so hard to make sense of and you could really cause me pain - could we break with my usual pattern and please not get involved with each other?”
So I went in with Lucia holding me (she’s always been holding me, through relocating country after divorce, through the novel I just delivered after twelve months work, and now through the change in my finances). Maybe I finally went in because the sea, the world down there is everything that is not itemised bills.
First of all, stupidly, I couldn’t believe how deep it was, an immediate rejoinder to the constant nagging fear that everything we do up there actually matters. “Look up!” people encourage us when we are anxious or hopeless. It’s so counterintuitive to look down for the answer, that’s the next part that blows away everything you believed on land.
Holding my arms, Lucia took me to visit a large red starfish, a different red from any I’ve seen in the life long quest for the variations on red lipstick. I saw fish with electric blue sides, dancing to Soft Cell. Don’t touch me please…and from tiny rock pockets emerged tabby striped cat fish, who’d be dressed in camouflage if they weren’t wearing red opera gloves on each fin. I relate most to them: don’t look at me/why aren’t you looking at me?
The depths, the shapes, the extension and caverns and libraries, conservatories and corners under there shocked my senses as much as the marine life itself. I’m never not fantasising about real estate I can’t have. But also. But also? The strangest feeling I got down there, snorkelling for the very first time: This is none of my business. This is private. It’s not that it’s not interesting, it’s too interesting. If I looked very much longer how would I go back to itemised bills? So I have now been snorkelling. It blew my mind. I must never do it again, a resolution as firm as when in my teens I took ecstasy four weekends in a row: I’ve had an amazing time and I ought not push my luck. I’ve never touched it again.
So I put my head back above the surface, instinct telling me to act like what I’d just seen had never happened - like when you see your cat way far up the street from your house and you can’t make eye contact with each other or the parameters of both your mental safe zones are broken.
It’s sex too you are reminded of when you look under the ocean at the other universe. Of course it is. The push and pull. The currents. The undertow. There’s someone from my far away past who, as I swam, I realised would no longer would have a correct number for me. It’s best this way, it’s too powerful what went between us, it would be like if I went snorkelling every day to stare at the fish under the sea.
The man in the Netflix documentary ‘My Octopus Teacher’ is an unhinged narcissist and I’ve been that before. The man is in love with the octopus. That’s what that wildly exhilarating, heartbreaking relationship I had all those decades ago was exactly like.
Looking under the water, I thought of death - not being eaten by a shark funnily enough - but what my Mother said about why we don’t have open caskets in Judaism: to look at her Father’s corpse would have been disrespectful since he could not look back. The fish, in their other dimension, have no choice about being peered at. It felt uncomfortable.
The Azores has a history with Sephardic Jews (Jews from Portugal, Spain or the Middle East. Mizrahi Jews are from Africa). The Sephardic Jews fled the Portuguese inquisition. In 1818 Jews from north Africa started showing up to import merchandise and sell to local businesses. An 18th century Moroccan Torah was mysteriously found in a sea cave in 1997 (the travel writer Judith Fein has a lot on this that you can look up in the Jerusalem Post.) To visit the island synagogue, constructed in the 18th century, you walk through an ordinary, somewhat dilapidated building. Synagogues had to be hidden, which I find exceptionally moving since we all have a secret self, a room of Azul and gold glory tucked behind slabs of grey.
After I snorkelled for the first time, I remembered Leonard Nimoy saying he’d invented the Vulcan salute from a boyhood memory of peeking at the Kohanim in synagogue (the priests who you must close your eyes to as they pray.) They were making that symbol with their hands and he was hypnotised, whilst aware he was seeing something he mustn’t. I’m not as powerful as Leonard Nimoy. Or maybe I am but I don’t want the responsibility.
Crabs scuttled as I pulled myself back onto the rocks, the Vulcan pinch in my head. It’s a point of fascination to us that the actors who played Captain Kirk and Spock in Star Trek were both from religious Jewish homes. Like - we had to keep moving on and moving on and moving on from where we came, chased from each and every country we tried to make a life in until we ended up in space? But now we’re free?
The last thing I thought of as I was processing my time gazing into the beautiful abyss was a story Andres Balazs told me about a night he spent at his hotel, The Chateau Marmont. I’d asked about the history of ghost spotting in its legendary darkened halls. He said he’d woken up one night to find a spectral couple embracing on the end of his bed and, rather than freaking out, he closed his eyes and very gently tried to go back to sleep: “I felt I was intruding”.
The spectral couple embracing on the end of the bed, the fish under the sea: one must in both cases gently close your eyes. As evolved humans, it is our duty, when we witness something holy, to look away. The glimpse was enough. You know it’s there now. There’s a whole other world and you’ve had proof.
It’s why it’s so incomprehensible to me to commit to a life of Torah study exclusively, or any extreme branch of a religion where your days are nothing but studying the text over and over and over. It’s there. You saw it. Go back to land and carry that in you. Spending your days parsing religious text is like plucking the starfish from its secret rock and taking it back with you to land. It loses its unique colour and its magic. You don’t run inventory on the glorious - that seems like spirituality 101.
So here’s what I have to say, having snorkelled in the time of a war led by mad men professing they are guided by their religion: maybe G-d doesn’t want you to bother *him so much. Maybe he just wants you to know that he’s there and that you’re not crazy for believing. But you can think of him without having to poke around in his business, without having to capture him in a net, haul him onto land so his colour changes. G-d is too precious to be handled. He will turn brittle and disintegrate in your hands.
*(or she, do your thing)
Thank you. Outstanding.
Beautiful