Time

I've been thinking about time.

I suppose it began in the Pacific, although I didn't realise it at the then.

We were sailing across the ocean, far from land. The wind had dropped and everyone had decided to get into the water to cool off. I was on watch, so I went in last, just as everyone else was getting out.

Then the wind picked up.

With the mainsail still up, the boat began to move away from me.

At first the crew were shouting for me to swim faster. They were all leaning over the back of the boat, reaching towards me, shouting, “Swim! swim!”

I swam towards them but the gap just kept getting bigger, the waves now begining to slap me in the face.

I remember thinking, don't they realise I'm not going to be able to do this?

I was frightened that they couldn't see that I was in trouble— that somehow the responsibility for getting back to the boat had become mine. I knew I wasn't going to make it...

But of course, they thought they were encouraging me, giving me hope.

It just took time, for them to see what was happening, and understand that the situation was worse than they had first thought, and then to decide to act. By then the boat had already moved some distance away.

It's strange to think about that now.

From where they were, they were watching me. From where I was, I was watching them. We were looking at the same situation from completely different positions.

I noticed the horizon.

How far away is the horizon when you are only inches above the surface of the water?

I had never thought about it before.

From the water, everything is different. Your viewpoint is so low. The swell rises and falls around you. A boat can disappear surprisingly quickly.

I watched it getting smaller.

And I began thinking about the buckets.

We used buckets on ropes to collect seawater to wash the boat. I had lost several. If the boat was moving too quickly, the drag could pull the rope out of your hand and the bucket would disappear behind you. Once it had gone, it was almost impossible to find again.

Now I was thinking about myself in the same way.

I was smaller than the bucket. My head was smaller than those bright yellow buckets, and I wasn't bright yellow. If a bucket could disappear so quickly, how visible was I?

I was becoming an object.

I was thinking about distance, visibility, colour, scale, the horizon, the movement of the water. I was calculating how quickly the boat had disappeared and how long it might take to return.

And somewhere amongst all of this, I remembered something I had read about Lacan and the gaze.

Hal Foster had first led me towards Lacan, and I had subsequently read more. I remembered an image of the gaze — the observer looking towards an object, and the object somehow looking back.

Floating there, I suddenly found myself inside that image.

I was looking towards the boat.

But from the boat I was the object in the water.

I was both the person looking and the thing being looked for.

There was a very real possibility that I might not be found.

And yet, alongside the fear and the calculations, I became intensely aware of where I was.

The sky.

The air.

The swell.

The sound of the water.

The surface changing around me.

The enormous expanse of ocean in every direction.

I was very small.

Time seemed to have changed.

For the crew, everything was urgent. They had to manoeuvre the boat, drop the sail, turn around. The captain noting my position . They were doing things.

For me, time seemed to stretch.

It seemed like an age.

And yet the whole thing had happened incredibly quickly. The wind had picked up, the boat had gone, and now I was waiting for it to return.

The strange thing was that the wind itself died down again very quickly.

But by then it didn't matter.

The boat had already gone.

I waited, looking towards the place where I thought it might reappear.

I couldn't see very far...

So time began to feel different to me.

Not time as something measured by a clock, but time as something that changes according to where you are, what you can see, what you are waiting for and what you believe might happen next.

In those few minutes, so many different thoughts were happening at once.

Fear.

Calculation.

Memory.

Visibility.

Distance.

The horizon.

The possibility of disappearing.

The memory of a book.

The physical world around me.

I wasn't simply waiting for the boat.

I was trying to work out where I was.

And perhaps that is why the experience has stayed with me.

Because for a short period of time, I was measuring myself against an ocean that was almost impossible to measure.

“I remembered an image I had once seen in a book about Lacan: a fisherman in a boat, looking towards an object in the water, a sardine can. Two cones of vision crossed between them, each appearing to look towards the other. Lacan used the image to describe the gaze — the unsettling realisation that the thing we look at can also, in some sense, look back.”