(from The Interior Architecture Reader, edited by Gregory Marinic, 2018 Routledge)

Chapter 16

Oceanic interiorities

Sarah Treadwell

Stepping precariously into the sea, across a littoral of dried weed, sharp shells, and plastic, is a moment of slight anxiety and clenched muscles. The water rises up the body as the beach slopes down; lifted, immersed, and changed in temperature, the body is held by surrounding water. To float, buoyed up by contouring liquid of a silky kind, the sky dazzling, inspected by cruising seagulls, requires trust and relaxation undermined by recurrent images of the unknown in deep water.

To push into the depths accelerating away from sweet air into a greenish, blurred world with limited horizons, briefly sea creature, cetaceous and skillful, is some sort of amniotic return, and an acknowledgement of complicity; human bodies mix salt and water. Out of your depth in many senses the sea lifts and submerges; dragging on flesh, it seems reluctant to release you back into everyday life. You carry the sea with you.

To live in the South Pacific is to be conscious of the watery nature of interiority. Epeli Hau’ofa, a Fiji Islander, writer, and anthropologist of Tongan descent writing for Oceanic people, starts his text, The Ocean in Us, with words from poet Teresia Teaiwa: “We sweat and cry salt water, so we know that the ocean is really in our blood.” On the other side of the world, British historian Philip Hoare, in his book The Sea Inside, wrote of his daily immersion in northern oceans and his longing for engagements with the deep waters that maintain the globe. These recurrent references to an interior relationship with the sea suggest a spatiality that this chapter will traverse.

Water covers approximately seventy percent of the earth’s surface. The salt-laden oceans constitute the most extensive interiors that we confront, and on which we depend. Because we have the sea within us and because we also fear immersion (in the collective) in death, the sea is envisaged in this chapter as a spatial condition that epitomizes our vacillations between individuality and collectivity. This conflicted relationship is explored through the making of a written image of the space of the sea; an image of oceanic spatiality constructed by following threads of writing that exhibit a sensitivity to the vast interior space that we exploit, pollute, and endlessly imagine as escape.

Speculating on conditions of oceanic space that acknowledge the shared and discrete natures of bodies and objects of the world, the written image addresses the inevitable tension between the spaces of our collective alignment and the temporality of individual lives. Each being in the world – human and nonhuman – tends to be resistant to being taken over. Each body can also be seen as open to combined engagements through the action of work and negotiation.

To swim in the sea is to form, momentarily and warily, a collaborative relationship with the medium while still maintaining our breathing selves. To undertake oceanic writing is to recall and enact that collaboration.

Artist Robert Smithson shaped earth and water into a spiral with the understanding that there was a connection between the Red Sea and blood; oceanic writing acknowledges the scalar shifts between human and

marine bodies, both liquid and teeming with life. Such oceanic interiority is maintained by permeable membranes (skin and shore) that permit separation while allowing connections at individual and global scales. These encounters have ethical and formal conditions. The immersive interior is, in one sense, a uterine space; a space of beginning that endlessly repeats the ordinary dramas of life and recognizes an exteriority within that cannot be expelled.

Interior geometries and porous conditions

Epeli Hau’ofa ends his influential essay, “Our Sea of Islands,” with the following words addressed to the people of Oceania, cast by the West as isolated inhabitants on small and insignificant islands in a vast sea. Hau’ofa instead understands the inhabitants as part of an expansive liquid terrain, a surface that is traversed with skillful navigation:

Oceania is vast, Oceania is expanding, Oceania is hospitable and generous, Oceania is humanity rising from the depths of brine and regions of fire deeper still, Oceania is us. We are the sea, we are the ocean, we must wake up to this ancient truth and together use it to overturn all hegemonic views that aim ultimately to confine us again, physically and psychologically, in the tiny spaces that we have resisted accepting as our sole appointed places and from which we have recently liberated ourselves.6

Hau’ofa points to a vital enlargement of space – oceanic space as expansive, extending past the terrestrial ground of islands to make connections of all sorts. The skills of navigation were recorded in the sand and in stick charts, precise spatial descriptions of bodies moving under a rotating sky in a wide-horizoned ocean. The stick charts describe geometries of the surface of the sea aligned to time, with marks that record moving islands, rising stars, and planets. Hau’ofa points out that prior to European arrival in the Pacific, “Boundaries were not imaginary lines in the ocean, but rather points of

entry that were constantly negotiated and even contested. The sea was open to anyone who could navigate his way through." The sea is porous, map-like, narrated, and figured.

On the brink (of falling) Philip Hoare wrote on his daily practice of swimming in The Sea Inside:

That fixity of sea and sky is a supreme deception… The horizon is only an invention of our eyes and brains as we seek to make sense of that immensity and locate ourselves within it. The sea solicits such illusions. It takes color from the clouds, becomes a sky fallen to earth; it only suggests what it might or might not contain. Little wonder that people once thought that the sun sank into the sea, just as the moon rose out of it.

On the surface, thickened with life, reactive to elsewhere, Hoare sees hints of a condition beneath the skin that is at times a mirror. Invitation and unreliability collect in his descriptions of the surface; meretricious, ornamental, the sky falls. Across the surface that stretches along the curvature of the earth, Hoare slides the horizon, which, while imitating closure, lures mind and body around the globe. Standing on the edge of a northern island, he notes:

The sea defines us, connects us, and separates us. Most of us experience only its edges, our available wilderness on a crowded island… Perpetually renewing and destroying, the sea proposes a beginning and an ending, an alternative to our landlocked state, an existence to which we are tethered when we might rather be set free.

Hoare reflects on oceanic, tidal oscillations that make and remove; his sea provides an image of the fluctuations of life: sailors might drown, but Aphrodite was born of sea foam, the floating sperm of Uranus, according to

Hesiod. For Hoare, the sea is shaped as a sharp-edged image of freedom opening into the world.

Teresia K. Teaiwa, in an essay on native Pacific cultural studies, “Lo(o)sing the Edge,” also tests the limits of oceanic edges. She writes of the edge of the ocean as a place to stand, a point to look out and back from and as a critical or cutting edge. She asks:

Is the edge always held at the edges of the Pacific? Is it possible to have an edge on the world’s largest ocean? Epeli Hau’ofa says that ‘our edge is the ocean’ (Waddell, Naidu, and Hau’ofa 1993). No other people have had their history shaped so much by an ocean. The islands of Kiribati and Tuvalu may not exist in thirty years’ time. ‘The ocean has the edge.’

The ocean in Teaiwa’s image is not only the recipient of history, but also its instigator and participant. Temperatures of the world have been raised, but it is the ocean itself that will pour across the reefs and beaches of Pacific islands, removing traces of past and present occupation. The ocean will change the histories of Pacific people; it is not possible, Teaiwa suggests, for people to have an edge on the Pacific. Herman Melville in Moby Dick, or: the White Whale gave that ocean a heartbeat and divinity. “Thus this mysterious, divine Pacific zones the world’s bulk about; makes all coasts one bay to it; seems the tide-beating heart of earth.”

Dreaming escape From the edge, an opening into the surface conditions of the sea prevails; we look out to a pulsing liquid skin that surrounds us. To fall into water is the stuff of fantasies and nightmares; sailors, those who navigate instrumentally, fear death by drowning while things beneath the surface disappear from consciousness, surfacing only as fleeting anxieties and desires. Attentive, no doubt, to the lines of reflection and dispersal that pattern and ornament the

sea. As a constrained child, John Ruskin, author of The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), gazed out from the edge.

Rosalind Krauss has told the story of Ruskin as a child watching the sea. Her reportage evokes his restricted and constrained childhood that left him with the gift of observation. Ruskin says:

But before everything, at this time, came my pleasure in merely watching the sea. I was not allowed to row, far less to sail, nor to walk near the harbor alone; so that I learned nothing of shipping or anything else worth learning, but spent four or five hours every day in simply staring or wondering at the sea. $^{13}$

The small, immobilized boy is aligned with the beat of the sea received only in his stillness, immobility undone imperceptibly by the waves, like the tides. The blood in his system barely circulates with the slow rhythm of passing time. An image of elsewhere, a removal from the social, the sea is pictured as “opening into a visual plenitude that is somehow heightened and pure, both a limitless expanse and a sameness, flattening it into nothing, into the no-space of sensory deprivation.” $^{14}$ Krauss’s words, like the waves under observation, construct the sea as a neutral space for wondering. The detached plane of the surface offers some sort of compensation for enforced restraint.

Beat of blood and guilt

The contemplation of the sea, childhood troughs and peaks of desire, inscribed in a wash of salty liquid, would in Ruskin’s adulthood turn vividly to color in response to Joseph Mallard William Turner’s painting, “Slave Ship.” $^{15}$ Ruskin wrote:

Purple and blue, the lurid shadows of the hollow breakers are cast upon the mist of the night, which gathers cold and low, advancing like the shadow of death upon the guilty ship as it labors amidst

the lightning of the sea, its thin masts written upon the sky in lines of blood … and cast far along the desolate heave of the sepulchral waves, incarnadines the multitudinous sea.16

Waves with no substance merge with the miasma of the scene. Stained and flaming, the sea carries the guilt of the slave ship, tinted with the blood of those cast into the water; waves as a funeral procession, marking passing lives, approaching death. The sea is described by Ruskin with reference to the guilt of Macbeth:

Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood

Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas in incarnadine, Making the green one red.17

Spreading guilt has replaced water’s virtues of cleansing and purifying. Marcus Wood, writing on the visual representation of slavery and Turner’s painting of a slave ship, noted that the “The potency of the red blood reasserts itself … to dye the entire sea.”18 More than was measured in the King James Bible in Revelation 8:8, where, when the “second angel sounded, and as it were a great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea: and the third part of the sea became blood.”19

Shot through with redness, partially or wholly bloody, oceans are colored by disaster or domestic dereliction (abattoirs regularly flow into the sea). Even as the sea, becoming blood, is oxygenated with an infusion of red cells, the “second angel emptied his bowl into the sea, which turned into a fluid like the blood of a corpse, and every living thing in it died.”20 The sea is understood as a container of all the detritus and rejected things of the world.

Tears overflow

Spatially imagined as a bleeding container of fear and trash, or a still surface mirrored and riven by geometry, or shaped as a mechanism for abstract

detachment, the sea is also remembered as an implacable leveler. In the early twenty-first century, a number of severe tsunamis hit Aceh, Japan, Samoa and other countries on ocean edges. The seas spread, dissolving and eliminating many thousands of objects: people, animals, insects, houses, furniture, and plants. Film clips from the time are haunting as the insignificance of individual objects is set beside an immense body of moving water in a washing away that rendered all equivalent; a scouring that left the earth of Aceh exposed. Statistics gathered from writing and reports on the tsunami noted:

Age and sex were described as risk factors for death … significantly higher death rates were reported among females… Significantly elevated risk of death was also observed in children … and older adults … Other risk factors included education which was inversely associated with mortality risk; fisheries-based livelihoods, indoor location at the time of the tsunami, and home destruction and the physical environment. The majority of tsunami deaths were due to drowning.

Statistics cannot remain dry in such circumstances. With the many deaths, the sea was both the instigator and repository of loss and mourning; lost love, becoming child in loss, the ocean filled with catastrophic tears. Hélène Cixous, in “Déluge,” wrote a final oceanic image of lost love and mourning:

I went right to the end of the labyrinth, under the roar of the tidal wave, I ran beneath the sea, I ran on the earth, I went right to the end of misfortune, above the racing tide rattled to the wind, below I forced my way, I went right to the limit which I pushed back, alive I abruptly entered behind the time after hope, as long as we advance we prevent the story from ending, I ran, everlasting the love – mourning in me the child-suffering created a flow of tears matching the tidal wave above, bearing love death life further, no I

would not let myself be comforted and dried out, I would run on until dream or reality gave me back my love, to the end, I run.24

The space of mourning is filled with the resistance of the running figure, unable to outstrip the water, in a space of dreaming where the child cannot be reached in time, always out of reach, where loss of love and life is imagined over and over again. The tidal reach of such images is found in the heaviness of slow-moving water, in a deep oceanic space, which bears both the negligence and the beauty of the world.

Every domestic interior is, in some senses, oceanic, being liquid (steam, moisture, and liquid emissions are constantly resisted) and permeable (cut through with doors and windows and sound); they are structured with geometries and surfaces that record the lives that they contain. Able to be tainted or sweetened, and subject to evaporation, oceanic interiors can be navigated with skill. At times resistant to collaborative ventures, they contain new life, failed marriages, and difficult childhoods. Despite being beset by a rising excess of material consumption, flooded with items that exist to maintain other systems and other desires, the domestic interior is oceanic in the tears that flow: sweat forms, blood falls, and waters break over the difficulties and pleasure of everyday life.

Marine references have fabricated an image of oceanic interiority as an empathetic practice, and oceanic spatiality emerges through a deployment of thick, oily lines of things and words; the extracted interior space being poised between the poetic and the accurate.25 To write is always to construct an interior, through familiarity and estrangement, and to write a pattern of oceanic interiority has been both an act of mourning and a collaborative, formal undertaking. Containing anxieties, rising waters, and detritus, reflecting desire and the passage of time, the sea repeats the interior passage of life born and ended.

Notes

Epeli Hau’ofa, “The Ocean in Us”, in We Are the Ocean: Selected Works, ed. Epeli Hau’ofa (Hawaii: The University of Hawaii Press, 2008), pp. 41–59.
Ibid., pp. 41–59.
Philip Hoare, The Sea Inside (London: Fourth Estate, 2013).
Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object Oriented Theology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013).
Robert Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty (1972)”, in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 1996), p. 148. “Chemically speaking, our blood is analogous in composition to the primordial seas. Following the spiral steps we return to our origins, back to some pulpy protoplasm, a floating eye in an antediluvian ocean.”
Epeli Hau’ofa, “Our Sea of Islands”, in Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific, ed. Vilsoni Hereniko and Rob Wilson (Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), p. 37.
Epeli Hau’ofa, “Our Sea of Islands”, in A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, ed. Eric Waddell, Vijay Naidu, and Epeli Hau’ofa (Suva, Fiji: The University of the South Pacific School of Social and Economic Development, in Association with Beake House, 1993), p. 9.
Hoare, The Sea Inside, p. 17.
Hoare, The Sea Inside, p. 7.
Hesiod, Theogony, (8th–7th century BC), line 195, www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0130%3Acard%3D173 (accessed 19 May 2015).
Teresia K. Teaiwa, “Lo(o)sing the Edge”, The Contemporary Pacific 13, no. 2 (Fall 2001): 345, www.academia.edu/3293752/L_o_osing_the_Edge
Herman Melville, Moby Dick, or: the White Whale (London: Hodder and Stoughton Ltd., 1930), p. 445.
Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1998), p. 2.
Ibid., p. 2.
Joseph Mallard William Turner, *The Slave Ship, 35%” x 48%”, Oil on Canvas (Boston, MA: Museum of Fine Arts Boston, 1840).
John Ruskin, Modern Painters, Vol. 1 (Gutenberg Ebook, 4 September 2009), www.gutenberg.org/files/29907/29907-h/29907-h.htm#b2s5c3p32 (accessed 15 May 2015).
William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 2, scene 2, lines 75–78, www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/macbeth_2_2.html (accessed 15 May 2015).

18 Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 66.

19 The Book of Revelations: A New Translation of the Apocalypse, trans. John Bertram Phillips (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1957), p. 36.

20 Ibid., p. 36.

21 Becky Oskin, “Japan Earthquake & Tsunami of 2011: Facts and Information”, p. 22 August 2013 06:02pm ET, www.livescience.com/39110-japan-2011-earthquake-tsunami-facts.html (accessed 15 May 2015). “In Japan, residents are still recovering from the disaster. Radioactive water was recently discovered leaking from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, which suffered a level 7 nuclear meltdown after the tsunami. Japan relies on nuclear power, and many of the country’s nuclear reactors remain closed because of stricter seismic safety standards since the earthquake. Two years after the quake, about 300,000 people who lost their homes were still living in temporary housing, the Japanese government said.”

22 Toni O’Loughlin and Adam Gabbatt, “Samoa Tsunami: At Least 100 Feared Dead on Pacific Islands”, The Guardian, 30 September 2009, www.theguardian.com/world/2009/sep/30/samoa-tsunami (accessed 15 May 2015).

At least 100 people are believed to have died and many more been injured in the Pacific island nations of Samoa, Western Samoa and Tonga after the powerful undersea earthquake this week that led to tsunami waves up to six metres high.

Officials in Samoa, the worst-hit location, said 63 people were known to have been killed as the fast-churning waters flattened buildings and swept people and cars out to sea, although this figure was expected to rise significantly with many more remote locations still being searched.

23 Shannon Doocy, Amy Daniels, Anna Dick, and Thomas D. Kirsch, “The Human Impact of Tsunamis: A Historical Review of Events 1900–2009 and Systematic Literature Review”, PLOS Currents Disasters, 16 April 2013, Edition 1, [http://currents.plos.org/disasters/article/the-human-impacts-of tsunamis-a-historical-review-of-events-1900-2009-and-systematic-literature-review/](http://currents.plos.org/disasters/article/the-human-impacts-of tsunamis-a-historical-review-of-events-1900-2009-and-systematic-literature-review/) (accessed 15 May 2015).

24 Hélène Cixous, “Déluge”, in The Hélène Cixous Reader, ed. Susan Sellers (London: Routledge, 1994).

25 Miller, Speculative Grace, p. 99.