2016-10-29 at 8:19 AM UTC
Looked up some recording of the sound of waves crashing on a beach on youtube or whatever. First time I've ever done that. I hate the beach. I grew up on the beach, as I kid I remember spending nights on islands where I was literally the only human there, warm nights, sleeping on the beaching. Sharing a beach with two or three other people. Waking up in the early dawn, the waves sound different when the opposite coast is 30 feet behind you.
Freude talked about the association of the ocean with emptiness, in western forms it's usually the vastness of the sea that's elevated to the sublime, sometimes depictions of drowning. In cultures better acquainted with beaches it's the sound, the unceasing rhythm. The period of the song is perhaps 6 hours but over enough time the pattern becomes clear. You learn to tell the difference between a rising and sinking tide by ear. That's insane right? Like you can tell it from a 30 second clip out of a period of 6 hours and somehow know if it's ascending or descending. The relative difference in tone between successive waves should be significantly less than the human capacity for discernment between pitch points, so there must be some greater information encoded there.
But that's gross, it quantifies something that's so much more than a measure of differentials. You don't know the waxing form the waning tide by extrapolation from a sample, it's intuitive, it's a sensory dimension entirely separate from the normal streams, it's composite and yet accessible to the intellect only by a separate, independent means. Like how we sense spatial orientation as a composite computation of basic values and yet it's reported to us separately from the inputs that inform it (you have a sense of "being upside down" that's a separate experience from the tactile sense of being pulled towards one's head).
But it's the loneliest sound in the world. It's a dull ache to even recall. Inevitable. Your senses know how to deal with it, some acoustic region of the brain uses it eternally was a market of your position in space on a macro level, and perhaps that's why the same sound from every angle is so disorienting, intoxicating. A force so consistent that it reduces rocks to sand, it goes on and on, it breaks rocks into sand, it reduces such structure to dust and one can't but feel an inanimate piece in a much larger collage in the face of such unrelenting force, annihilating far longer lived material than one's self.
Watching the surf, laying in it, feeling the looser more softly defined curves of environs defined by the sea is some sort of horrifying and reassuring at once. It's dark in it's own expansive way and yet so familiar.
2016-10-29 at 9:04 AM UTC
How is the ocean even dark and unnerving. I've been to the sea recently, i literally live a short drive from the coast. And i had this overwhelming urge to touch the water. As i did, i felt the most wondrous sensation of being connected to everything and touching the entire planet. It was awesome. Almost spiritual even. I consider myself lucky to be part of something bigger than me, as in the Universe big. Isn't is special that by chance, something in the Universe was created that has the capacity to understand the Universe itself? It's almost as if the Universe wants to understand itself.
2016-10-29 at 3:33 PM UTC
I've never seen the ocean.
2016-10-30 at 3:48 AM UTC
I wonder if there's an audio recording that simulates the experience of drowning.
2016-10-30 at 4:07 AM UTC
^ Get your fuckin ass to tc and commence getting high :D
