The Sea Within

maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach (to play one day)
and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles, and
milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;
and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles: and
may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.
For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea

~ ‘maggie and milly and molly and may’ by EE Cummings

IT’S ALWAYS Ourselves we find in the sea. Yet, there’s so much more to find there. Among the panicky crabs rushing into the spray, the hasty fish dashing into the sand, the easy­going dolphins leaping in the Bay of Bengal where I’ve been living for almost 15 years you can discover an immense mirror steeped in history, biological wonders, myth, struggle and bliss. While I scrape the bottom of my feet walking on a beach off the Coromandel coast at first light, I breathe in the northerly winds carrying oxygen and joy into my lungs. And I think about the sea.

Seasonally, the fishermen stand in a row, feet dug in the sand, hauling their nets. Some believe they are pulling out the sun from the horizon, rhythmically, one beam at a time. It is a glittering feast of gold, peach, orange and pinkish hues imbuing the morning firmament. At sundown, I pace along the same shores, as the vestiges of the day bow out through the casuarina forest, long radiant threads dancing among the branches, while the sea cloaks itself in a sombre greenish tinge.

I stare at the Bay of Bengal and wonder how my reaction to this beatific contemplation has transformed through the years, how I might have become inured to its natural charms, how my chest no longer swells as it did in awe of this maritime majesty. Has something changed? Although I’m known to stick to what I truly love, like the mountains, hazelnut and chocolate ice-cream, the Indian woman who brought me to live here, writing and walking, it is inevitable that as years ripen the perceivers and their sensorial capabilities, the perceived is altered as well.

From my first days on this isolated beach in Tamil Nadu, north of Pondicherry and south of Mahabalipuram, I’ve wondered how differently I experienced this reality compared to the local fish­ermen, the shepherds, the construction workers, the farmers, the affluent neighbours, the ashram meditators and the day-trippers who at times cross my path. “Selfie, please!”

I’ve grown up with the idea of the beach as a summer home, a distinct season in my European upbringing, drenched in a different history from the Indians who often plunge fully clad into the crushing waves at sunset.

What I’ve immediately recognised in these Indian waters is that—compared to the seas I’ve gazed, swam, deep dived and sailed into, in all the continents—the Bay of Bengal’s murky brownness, with its un-tropical bronze seriousness and down-to-business undertow, often brings me back to youthful summers from 1970 to 1990, spent on a thin, long beach near Venice, along the Adriatic seashores of Northern Italy.

My grandmother had bought a small two-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a building with a sea view in a beach resort town called Jesolo Lido. It had a dark blue tiled swimming pool with a yellow thick border we would dive off from, a flurry of colourful beach umbrellas and wooden chaise longues crowding the private sands all the way up to a cement wall where you could walk into a narrow public beach lined with reefs inching into the sea.

Jesolo Lido was the multifarious universe of my summer growth. I’d walk into that beach in June as one person, and head out a couple of months later a different boy, baked by the sun, caked dry by the sandy dust, marinated in the Adriatic waters, a galaxy of freckles brushed across my nose and cheeks, morphed by formative experiences of friendship, enmities, celebrations of youth and excitement. It was a cosmos constellated at first by innocently playing hide and seek at night, then strumming guitars while singing by the bonfires lighting up dark beaches. It was the times of the earliest slow-dance parties, the summer crushes, and timid kisses which at daytime turned into hours of dusty football matches, rough water polo challenges, volleyball, bocce bowling, badminton, swimming and waterskiing, but also fishing with a rod, with nets, pulling out molluscs with my bare feet from the sandbar. In those skimpy bikini and topless days of the 1970s and 1980s, the land of Speedos, it was also the discovery of bodies, the inquiry into objects of desire.

It was a sociological experiment, mixing people of different classes, regional and national origin. My summer friends came from towns I’d never visited at the time, like Mestre, Venice, Treviso, Brescia, Milan, Torino, but also from Austria, France, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK. Their parents were truck drivers, lawyers, architects, account­ants, businessmen, teachers, workers. Stripped to their Speedos from class-con­scious uniforms, the brands, the worker’s and farmer’s t-shirts, the white-collar cotton shirts, the cheap versus the luxury, on that anonymous theatre paved with sand, our parents had to blend. And so did we.

It built cohesion, openness, dialogue, as a small-town boy from a remote valley of the Veneto, like me, could discover young people from other parts of Italy, but, more importantly, from Europe. It made us get over what at first felt alien and foreign. It was the beachy foundation of cosmopoli­tanism, in its own way. The phenomenon of the post-industrial Italian beach pried open our provincial doors to show us what existed outside.

Working as a cashier in my grandfather’s pharmacy in August during middle school (yes, voluntary child labour), I’d saved enough money to buy a small sailboat which I parked in the Jesolo Lido garage. Having understood I’d better become financially independent fast, I earned some cash giving sailing lessons to younger children.

My 4.7 meters 1978 lateen-rigged Sunfish sailboat made me discover a different sea from the crowded shores filled with well-oiled sun-bathers. As the wind rose, I would set the mainsail and the jib, and head out all alone toward the horizon until I could no longer see the shoreline. A shudder of adrenaline would fill my teenage arms, legs and stomach rushing fast to my head which had to stay focused on keeping the sails in optimal tension in order to exploit the breeze, and not to get hit by the boom while turning around the boat to head back to safety.

Jesolo Lido was the multifarious universe of my summer growth. I’d walk into that beach in June as one person, and head out a couple of months later a different boy, baked by the sun, caked dry by the sandy dust, marinated in the Adriatic waters

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I can still evoke the calming sound of seawater splashing against the hull when I smiled up to the sky, in a solitary bliss, free, surrounded only by the mysteries of the fauna below, the milky emptiness of the space around me, the salty foam flying up to my lips, as I leaned out of the boat to steady it. It was the discov­ery of sea as mystic adventure. It was a solitary and esoteric glee that mixed the salt of my joyful young tears with those of the sea.

“It’s nasty weather like this here
that turns heads grey before their time”
~ The Sea Wolf by Jack London

At the risk of sounding macho, I have to confess I’ve had my share of thrills in the oceans. While reporting on Greenpeace’s anti-nuclear protests in the mid-1990s, I sailed for two weeks on the Pacific Ocean from the capital of Tahiti, Papeete, to the French atoll of Mururoa aboard the Machias. It was an old schooner whose captain, a Burt Lancaster look alike called Bill Austin, would do sit ups on deck under the tropical rain while the cook caught fresh tuna which he quickly chopped into sushi.

As we reached the French Navy nuclear base along with several European, Japanese, Australian and New Zealander parliamentarians, I climbed on a motorless sailboat which was boarded in rough waters by French marines who detained us. We were jailed overnight under the watch of the French Foreign Legion, after kindly being served hot coffee and delicious cookies, my very own adventurous madeleines…

A few months later, aboard the MV Greenpeace, I sailed from Manila to Hong Kong, through the Philippines Sea, the East China Sea, the Taiwan Strait into the South China Sea, entering first the Shanghai harbour in yet another anti-nuclear test protest, risking 10 years in jail for counter-revolutionary activities, as I documented the Chinese coast guard detaining the environmentalists.

A few years earlier, I’d spent a night trying to sleep on a tilted 14 meters sailboat captained by the descendent of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a friend who ran his Yrka into the sandbanks on a stormy night in Sag Harbor, Long Island. I’ve briefly paralysed my legs, as I got slammed by a nasty wave while body surfing in Pensacola beach in the Gulf of Mexico. I hurt my back diving from Capri’s Faraglioni cliffs. I’ve deep dived into a school of sharks in the Maldives. To say all this might appear as testos­teronal boasting, but I’m sharing it to explain a first-person investigation into the lure of dangers in the sea. What self was I irresponsibly trying to find in those risky waters?

When I now ask myself why I got caught in such predic­aments I blame literature. Like many of my generation, I’ve grown up on a healthy diet of Jack London, Joseph Conrad, Herman Melville. But, also, on the comic book stories of Corto Maltese by Hugo Pratt, the novels of Colombian Alvaro Mutis, along with the prolific bibliography of my fellow Veneto author, Emilio Salgari, who hailed from a town an hour away from where I grew up.

Salgari is considered the father of Italian adventure fiction, the forefather of Spaghetti Westerns, the author of the famous ‘Sandokan’ series, ‘The Black Corsair’ series, ‘The Queen of the Caribbean,’ ‘Captain Tempest’ and many more. Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Isabel Allende, Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda all attested to reading him when young. Che Guevara devoured 62 of his books, finding an anti-imperialist soul in his plots. And look where that led him: getting killed in an ambush in the Bolivian mountains.

Funnily enough, Salgari made a single sailing trip up and down the same Adriatic Sea of my Jesolo summer sailing. His last wishes were: “Bury me at sea.” He wasn’t. His remains are resting in Verona. Maybe because of this tortured relationship with the sea, fed by a deep nostalgia, he was able to transform the unromantic, grey Italian seas into the infinite tropical oceans that were the set of the most amazing adventures of his imaginary heroes, as if the sea were an archetypal dimension that lives within us all.

The earliest discovery of the seductive call of the dangers in high waters is to be found in Homer’s Odyssey. I recently travelled to Scylla, which the Greek bard describes as a rock of barking dogs, crossing the Messina Strait on a ferry into Sicily through the “swallowing sea” of Charybdis. It was inevitable to evoke Ulysses asking his sailors to fill his ears with wax in order to resist the treacherous call of the mermaids.

The sea is the liquid thread stitching the adventures of this Hellenic literary prototype of acumen and wit, but it also guides his destiny, out of human control. That is why, when I contemplate the Greek seas, from a beach in Amorgos, or Rhodes, or on a ferry along the Aegean Sea, I can’t help but conjure swift Aeolus, the god of the winds, fickly peek-a-booing among the clouds, ready to send more sailors into scary waves.

I thought about this Olympian divinity when writing this, as I was tensely following on a screen the solo traverse of the Atlantic Ocean of a childhood friend, Giorgio, who aboard his sailboat ran into a storm, slipped on deck, broke a couple of ribs, and had to face 35 kts gale winds and 6 meters high waves. Thanks to the god of communication, Mercury, we are now all joined by social media, where Giorgio broadcast every step of this nautical hazard in a regular video-log on his Instagram feed. The mysteries of voyage are now delivered almost live. Although you may feel connectivity will bring faster rescue, the storytelling in streaming feels just as scary to me.

I’ve sailed from the Roman coastline to Sardinia, down the Croatian coast to Marco Polo’s birthplace, around the Turkish bays, across the Bali Sea, along the Californian shores, through the Abu Dhabi lagoons… yet, following me at every turn of the rudder, at every gust of breeze, was the memory of my youthful readings of the Odyssey, ruined as I am by the over-structure of literature.

All is played out in this postcard on the shores of Tamil Nadu, which truly becomes a double-liminal location: where the Byronic human control and nature’s Tsunamic and cyclonic wrath face each other, but also where the ancient faces the forthcoming

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Greek mythology reeks with the anxiety caused by the wrath of the seas presided by the god of the oceans, Poseidon, whose beard and grey locks I sometimes imagine rising through the rowdy waves of the Bay of Bengal. Although Neptune (his Roman name) wields a trident just like Shiva, his Hindu avatar is Varuna or Mitra. I imagine, as I swim in the Bay’s waters, Poseidon/Neptune blending into Varuna/Mitra in my tendency to join East and West.

It is, this sea of ancient mythologies and gods, a place inhab­ited by threatening Leviathans, by the menacing Kraken of the Norse tradition. No wonder Dante’s third circle of hell is lined with sand.

“Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where
Nor any drop to drink.
The very deep did rot: O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea”
~ ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

For centuries the land-besieging waters have been an entity to be feared and worshipped, quite far from the over-crowded industrialised Jesolo Lido beach of my early years of discovery, a product, as we will see later, of Roman baths and the British industrial revolution cum imperialism. It was the sea as perceived before Romanticism, a literary and philosophical construct which transformed how we experience natural elements, democratically repackaged as they now are as mass tourism products for discount tours.

It was the threatening sea sailed by Nostromo, the waters that turn into menacing rivers crawling up a Heart of Darkness in the pages of Polish-born Conrad. Sure, it was also the colonialist waters of Rudyard Kipling. Yet the Bombay-born English author’s adventures, flaunted as they are by his British groupies, never reach the depth of Jack London’s quests, whose waters are so cold they bite the marrow, making you feel the grip of death, the anguish, the shock, as the acrid stuff in throat and lungs strangle the drowning, as described in the sinking of a ship in The Sea Wolf.

Jack London’s oceans are constant existential metaphors where even seasickness becomes a mirror of sensibility: “The earth is as full of brutality as the sea is full of motion. And some men are made sick by the one, and some by the other.” Facing the cruelty of the sea means facing reality, “its relentlessness and awfulness.”

The natural inhabitants of the sea are there to remind us of the animal destiny we share. The contemplation of nature, embodied by the sea, provides us with a key to understand our own existence, as London tells us in The Sea Wolf: “There is only so much water, so much earth, so much air; but the life that is demanding to be born is limitless. Nature is a spendthrift. Look at the fish and their millions of eggs. For that matter, look at you and me. In our loins are the possibilities of millions of lives. Could we but find time and opportunity and utilize the last bit and every bit of the unborn life that is in us, we could become the fathers of nations and populate continents.”

In Herman Melville’s pen, this ancient mare monstrum becomes a powerful allegory of the primordial conflict be­tween humans and the mysterious forces of nature. Moby Dick, a tragic epic of blood and death, is a metaphor of human destiny investigating the ambiguity of life. Its characters are torn without a real possibility of definitive choices—his Homeric and Biblical ocean is again the kingdom of monsters, the stuff of terror, of depths escaping human comprehension.

Although Neptune (his Roman name) wields a trident just like Shiva, his Hindu avatar is Varuna or Mitra. I imagine, as I swim in the bay’s waters, Poseidon/Neptune blending into Varuna/Mitra in my tendency to join East and West

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Yet the sea, once it enters your heart, tows you back, relent­lessly. It happens to the most rugged of pirates, corsairs, and sailors of literature. It is also the case of Amirbar, Alvaro Mutis’ novel, the tale of a young sailor joining an Icelandic whaling ship in Cardiff, where all the crew falls ill from food poisoning: “The lesson of the sea, the long hours that I spent climbing on the highest part of the cage scanning the horizon, all of this meant such fullness for me, it filled me so intensely that noth­ing, since then, has come back to give me a similar sensation of freedom without borders, of absolute availability.”

The vastness of the ocean is a place where one can investigate the dark recesses of what lies inside, while contemplating the outside. The sailor tries to find this on land. But gives up: “Now I know it was useless and that I was wasting my time. I didn’t know it then. Bad luck. Don’t think I’m glorifying life on the sea. Working on a ship can be an exhausting ordeal, in fact, it almost always is.” Ultimately, for the eternal Ulysses, it is worth it.

YET DO NOT think the horrors and the ethical challenges are only relegated to the imagination of great writers. Life at sea has its rules. And they are different from land. The most famous legal case, an example studied in international maritime law, involves a ship named—too cutely for its destiny—the Mignonette, which sailed from Southampton to Sidney in 1884. After sinking, four survivors huddled on a raft. When they finished the leftovers, they devoured a captured turtle to the bones. On the brink of death, they allegedly drew lots: the captain slit the throat of the 17-year-old cabin boy who was eaten by the three survivors, who were rescued only five days later. One survivor turned witness against the captain and the other sailor who were sentenced to death, but were released after six months.

In Western maritime tradition, as long as lots have been properly drawn, it is not considered a crime to practice “sur­vival cannibalism”, an accepted social practice in the high seas. All that’s left of this gruesome horror story on water is the wax effigy of captain Tom Dudley, which you can find in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s museum in London; a testament that when you read all those stereotypical descrip­tions about brown savages roasting prisoners on a skewer, you should remember that Anglo-Saxon cutlery has been known to dig into flesh as well.

The day we went to the sea
mothers in Madras were mining
the Marina for missing children.
Thatch flew in the sky, prisoners
ran free, houses danced like danger
in the wind. I saw a woman hold
the tattered edge of the world
in her hand, look past the temple
which was still standing, as she was —
miraculously whole in the debris of gaudy
South Indian sun. When she moved
her other hand across her brow,
in a single arcing sweep of grace,
it was as if she alone could alter things,
bring us to the wordless safety of our beds.

~ ‘The day we went to the sea’ by Tishani Doshi

The day my father died on February 17, 2017, I went for a walk on the beach along the Coromandel coast. I recollect noticing a grave-like mound of sand with a cross on top of it—a finger had written the word “Lily” on it. Then I saw a dead turtle belly up. The rotting carcass of a seagull. Another turtle corpse was staring at me through empty eye sockets already eaten by the crows, as a wild dog growled in my direction. I remember it well, but I also double checked this recollection on an old post I made on that occasion on Instagram, that social media diary that now helps us escape oblivion.

OBLIVION IS THE familiar face of death, Milan Kundera wrote in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. The empti­ness of the sea reminds us of death born of amnesia. We will forget. We will be forgotten. This is what’s scary about the beach, that liminal space, that terrace on the infinite.

“Man marks the earth with ruin—his control/Stops with the shore…” wrote Byron as he incited the sea to “Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean-roll!” Beaches are boundaries. The edge of the unknown, the quintessential liminal space, the symbol of our limits. Yet so much has changed since Walter Benjamin waxed on about how “Nothing is more epic than the sea,” praising the appeal of its time­less, universal qualities in an era of pristine emptiness where the traveller could plunge into a feeling of lack of history and sense of place on the shores.

When I gaze at the emptiness of the beach in Paramankeni, I think Byron would not have written the same poem today. “Man” marks the sea with ruin as well as earth. His control no longer stops at the shore, strewn as it is with the artifacts of contemporary mass production madness: the glowing reflections of the hundreds of empty plastic bottles, cough medicine, flip-flops—or rather chappals, in this case—the light bulbs, the abandoned doll heads and all the stories hidden in those consumed objects that end up at my feet, when I wonder how differently the beach is perceived here, in this corner of India, compared to my old Jesolo Lido beach memories, the industrialisation of the shore now emulated in thousands of touristic spots in the globe, starting with Goa and on into Thiruvananthapuram.

Here, on this beach in Southern India, I see the co-habitation of the past and the future. It manifests itself clearly, as in a postcard, when I walk back towards the house one evening. Along a wall on top of the dune, I see the blue tarpaulin of improvised tents set up by the Adivasi families who visit here for a few weeks every year. They leave large red, yellow and blue plastic water jugs lying about. The children are playing on the shore, chasing crabs and each other, laughing in all their innocent vibrant beauty, the men and women stunning in the sunset glow. They exude freedom, as only nomads can.

From my first days on this isolated beach in Tamil Nadu, north of Pondicherry and south of Mahabalipuram, I’ve wondered how differently I experienced this reality compared to the local fishermen, the shepherds, the construction workers, the affluent neighbours, the ashram meditators

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Beyond their make-shift camp, I see the stringy iron rods emerging from cement columns, like creepy fingers reaching for the sky as if it was the future. Yet another villa is popping up alongside the house I live in, populating the sand with workers defecating at dawn. Covid seems to have convinced the afflu­ent to buy land with a sea view and build up their three-floor private resorts with well-tended gardens, swimming pools and watchpersons’ families waiting for the owners to come and visit, sometimes only twice a year.

The India of forever, the India of the people who were here before the Aryans and the Dravidians, those who can exploit everything nature has to offer, even the most degrading prey in the modernised eyes, and the India of the future, the economic power rising and taking over the world… All is played out in this postcard on the shores of Tamil Nadu, which truly becomes a double-liminal location: where the Byronic human control and nature’s tsunamic and cyclonic wrath face each other, but also where the ancient faces the forthcoming.

It is still, somewhat, the archaic shore which used to be scary, where the invaders landed, where pirates attacked, where the downtrodden of society would get pushed into, the beach-bums, the clandestine lovers in the bushes outside the gate, an ultimate periphery of forbidden sex, wreckages and destruction, cohabi­tating with what this Indian beach could soon become, industrialised, modernised, transformed from a place of liminality to an industrialised and sterile fun factory, dedicated to lucrative water-sports and rented beach chairs and umbrellas. The Westernisation of Asian shores has been crawling from Bali to Phuket. It is coming. It is a future I dread, willing Robinson Crusoe that I am, but that I can see lurking ahead in India as well. It is Jesolo Lido catching up with me when I no longer yearn it.

“He began, in a tone of great taste and feeling,
to talk of the sea and the sea shore;
and ran with energy through all the usual phrases
employed in praise of their sublimity and descriptive of the unde­scribable emotions they excite in the mind of sensibility.
The terrific grandeur of the ocean in a storm,
its glass surface in a calm, its gulls and its samphire
and the deep fathoms of its abysses, its quick vicissitudes,
its direful deceptions, its mariners tempting it in sunshine
and overwhelmed by the sudden tempest
— all were eagerly and fluently touched;
rather commonplace perhaps, but doing very well
from the lips of a handsome Sir Edward,
and she could not but think him a man of feeling,
till he began to stagger her by the number of his quotations
and the bewilderment of some of his sentences.”

~ Sandition by Jane Austen

TODAY, ONE-HALF of the world’s population lives with­in 60 km of an ocean. Ignoring calls of rising tides and global warming, coastal population has increased by 30 per cent in the last 30 years, and it’s expected to soar. Beachside properties are among the most valuable in the world. They are also those with the most vulnerable habitats. How did this hap­pen? Blame the Italians, or rather their ancestors, the Romans.

The first beach resorts for the rich sprouted on the charming Italian shores. Baie, today known as Bacoli, is an enchanting promontory along the Neapolitan coastline, overlooking the Gulf and the Vesuvius. Barcola, near Trieste, was covered with Roman luxury villas, planting the seeds of ancient leisure culture by the waters.

After that, for centuries beaches had become only frighten­ing places to be avoided. Not many people knew how to swim, including most sailors. Shark attacks would also keep fisher­men from plunging into the waves. Until the 18th-century aristocrats would say that only peasants sought refuge from the heat in the cool seawater.

Then, industrialisation changed society. The germination of factories in the United Kingdom dragged labour away from the country and the shores into the cities. While rural landscapes became abandoned, cities became overcrowded and unhealthy. Diseases of modernisation started to plague the sprawling urban crowds, reaching the upper class.

In 1750, Doctor Richard Russell began recommending bathing in the sea and drinking a pint of seawater daily. It was prescribed against all the evils of overcrowded industrial life: melancholy, rickets, gout, impotence, tubercular infections, menstrual problems and “hysteria.” Russel claimed to have cured leprosy with his sea water cures. Theories emerged about more oxygen found in the air by the sea. Soon, long residencies with a sea view became a popular treatment for tuberculosis. As aristo­crats and intellectuals became more preoccupied with their own health and hygiene, the beach resort provided a useful escape and a solution. The idea of the restorative sea that infused vigour into fragile and effete ruling class became common.

The first beach resort of modern times is considered to be Scarborough, near York, but soon other British coastal cities followed, the most famous being Brighton Beach. Women were dragged fully clad into wagons that drove into the water as they plunged into healthy baths, while men dived in the nude. In those first season of health tourism, people shielded from the sun, most bathers kept completely covered. Well-being came from the water not the sky. This era reaches its acme when Gustav von Aschenbach falls for the young Tadzio at the Venice Lido in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912). And when Mann’s Buddenbrooks spend their vacation on the Baltic shores. The term “vacation,” which used to mean “involuntary absence from work,” takes the connotation of “a desired interlude from regular life.”

Shortly afterwards, in the 1920s, Coco Chanel accidentally got sunburnt in the French Riviera which made tans trendy, as the first sun tanning oil was invented in France in 1927. Swim­suits got smaller all the way to the 1946 invention of the bikini. As beach resorts turned into a global phenomenon, in America, of course, all kinds of tricks were used to keep them segregated, so Black Americans had to develop their own beaches catering to people of colour.

Meanwhile, the trend was expanding, as British tourists in their health craze rented rooms in Normandy and Southern France, Northern Germany and Scandinavia. In their Grand Tours, they finally reached the beaches of Italy, where tourism now comprises 13 per cent of directly generated GNP.

The first beach resort of modern times is considered to be Scarborough, near York, but soon other British coastal cities followed, the most famous being Brighton beach. Women were dragged fully clad into wagons that drove into the water as they plunged into healthy baths, while men dived in the nude

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Beach tourism had meanwhile bro­ken the constraints of class. Better road infrastructure and railway networks made it possible to reach the shores at affordable rates. Going to the beach became something the middle class as­pired to, something that made the par­venu feel like they conquered a higher place in the social ladder. This eventual­ly exploded into low-cost travel which has filled the beaches with tourists from all classes and from all over the world, seeking a moment of bliss, rest and magic. From being a place that cured physical diseases, it soon became a place that, with its promises of fun and relaxation, would cure from urban stress, as it is seen today.

The arrival of the masses rede­signed the landscape into a non-place. New beach resort towns like Jesolo Lido sprung up, with night clubs and water rides. The seashore trans­formed from a source of seafood to a site of amusement and recreation, perfectly represented by the decadent abomination of Coney Island’s amusement park with an oceanic view. Sea sports like kite and surfing now feed the almost neurotic need for escapism of the privileged. Touristic beaches have become denatured and reconstructed as the purest expression of nature, just like the well-tended gardens of my affluent beach neighbours.

ALONGSIDE ECONOMIC and anthropological exam­inations, it is unavoidable to consider how literature, art and philosophy changed how we look at beaches. Painters like JMW Turner and Caspar David Friedrich began to depict rugged vistas by the sea with expressive intensity. The seascape became a central subject. Romantic writers added emotion and wonder to the act of strolling along the beach and watching the tide turn, much like I did at the beginning of this text. The beach was no longer an omen of disaster, it became a transformative experience hiding the promise of self-discovery, all the way to Ian McEwan’s Chesil Beach.

This eventually cordoned off the beach for escapism, sterilising it from reality. It became a blank slate, an abstraction, a place of constant new beginnings, at every season. Which is what ultimately might spell its end, since as Professor Jean- Didier Urbain, an expert on tourism culture at the University of Paris-Descartes, writes that “due partly to rising sea levels and increased storm action, but also to massive erosion caused by the human development of the shores 75 to 90 per cent of the world’s natural sand beaches are disappearing.”

Romanticism transformed how we look at nature. It repackaged what actually has been a collective exodus from rural land and shores to urban realities by offering the enriched descendants of displaced farmers and fishermen the glory of a seaside vacation turned into an industrialised pleasure. Mass tourists are unaware they are, in a way, simply returning to a place they came from, as writer Chris Christou analysed in his essay, ‘How We Got to the Beach/How We became Tourists.’

“Romanticism,” Christou writes, “became a way for Europeans to view at a distance the rupture of having lost the village to the city […] peasants became workers, the farm became the factory, and everything ancestral was either lost or commodified.” What we left behind in the rural abandoned landscape has transformed into an industry workers can come back to, but must pay in order to visit and experience what they lost. The beach has become a simulation, “a fleeting taste of liminal revelry and old-time kinship.” It is a ritual we devotedly practice thanks to our amnesia.

The good news is, it turns out that the sea is actually good for your skin and lungs. So, while we unconsciously rediscover our roots, dangerously sunbathing and surfing, we’re pre­venting or curing dermatitis and psoriasis. Sea water is indeed rich in magnesium, chloride, sodium, potassium, iodine and sulphur which all contribute to respiratory health, reducing allergies, sinus infections and asthma symptoms. It is good to bathe in the sea and breathe in the ocean air. And, according to a 2019 study published in Health and Place journal, people who live closer to the ocean have less mental stress. Those who live less than 2 km from the coast are 22 per cent less likely to suffer from mental health issues than those who live 50 km from the coast. I shouldn’t have said this. Now you’ll all want to come here, and turn this beach into another Coney Island.

For now, this strip of land where I buried a very missed adopt­ed stray black Pi dog named Bagheera, where I walked in silence after my father passed away, these footprints that bring me back to my early Jesolo days, and fill me with glee in the golden first sun, as I gaze at a Bay that feels like an epic ocean when I image maritime divinities rising among the dolphins, this shore re­mains a liminal strip of sand where past and future cross in front and behind my feet, like scuttling crabs diving into the waves.

About The Author

Carlo Pizzati

Carlo Pizzati is an award-winning multilingual author of ten books of fiction and non-fiction. He has worked as a foreign correspondent in several continents since 1987. He lives with his spouse and four dogs near a fishing village in Tamil Nadu

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