‘Making your unknown known is the important thing – and keeping the unknown always beyond you’ - Georgia O’Keeffe
Read on or listen to the audio to explore:
Beaches as liminal spaces that border the unknown
The role of the unconscious in Jungian psychoanalysis… & why we need to pay attention to it
The creative play between consciousness & psyche
Artwork: Wave, Night, 1928, Georgia O’Keeffe, oil on canvas, Phillips Andover Academy.
What lies beneath
Far below the beach flashes a smile, beckoning me towards the curve of gleaming white sand at the base of the cliffs and the liquid sapphire expanse of the ocean beyond.
Together with my husband and our two friends, we descend the rickety steps down the chipped slate of the cliff. When we arrive at the beach, it’s empty aside from a couple of gulls skimming the waves. White horses canter gracefully onto the shore before turning to foam. Shifting deposits of quartz-striped pebbles rattle like beads in the pull and drag of the outgoing tide. We settle on the thin margin of sand, Bedouins for the day, camping out beneath the blue canopies of our beach umbrellas.
With nothing to mark it except for the fade of the waves into a far-away hum, time slows almost to standstill. The horses disappear into puffs of white mist. The smile of the beach widens into a grin. The liquid sapphire peels back to reveal dark islands of metamorphic rock imprinted with huge spiral formations where a prehistoric mountain range once delineated the borders of long-gone continents and seas with strange phantasmagorical names - Rheic, Gondwana, Laurussia, Pangolea – before they tumbled in the slip and slide of giant underwater plates and collapsed into the depths.
Mesmerised by the remains of this lost world glinting in the sun, I leave the canopy of my umbrella to scramble the crepe-like concentric circles chiselled into the schist. For a single, bright moment I am at the first beach, listening to the first waves of the first ocean crash against the first shore.
Between sea & shore
Naturally occurring dreamscapes, beaches are mutable, transient spaces that take us to the edge of the unknown.
A couple of years ago on a road-trip along the U.S. Pacific Northwest coast I came across signs on almost every beach that read; ‘do not turn your back on the ocean’. They were there to warn of the giant ‘sneaker’ waves which can appear from nowhere and sweep unsuspecting beachgoers far out to sea. That we, likewise, do not turn our backs on the ocean of the unconscious, if we are not to be taken unaware by the giant sneaker waves that can rise up from our depths, is a foundational concept of Jungian psychoanalysis.
As Carl Jung famously said; ‘until you make the darkness conscious, you will call it fate and it will direct your life.’
Transient, ever-changing slips of sand that geomorphologically shift between the strange and familiar, transient and fixed, imagined and real, beaches offer a glimpse into the unknown through the rubbish and bones, shells and stones and strange unprocessed emotions that wash up on our shores.
On the beach everything is more naked and exposed, including ourselves. Stripped to our bikinis and shorts, or perhaps nothing at all, without the protection of our masks and self-constructed identities, we are more vulnerable to the wilds of the unknown. We dissolve at the edges, merge, disappear, become one with the beach. At the same time, we feel freer, more liberated, more our true selves.
Whittled to the bone, the beach polishes us like stone. We return, the sand in our hair, desiccated and sun-blown, exfoliated and burnished, purified by the wind and salt water, tuned to the slow, steady hum of the earth sounding from beneath the boom of the waves, somehow transformed, if only briefly.
In this state of nakedness, we become more like children. It was while playing in the sand on the beach of a Swiss lake that Carl Jung discovered he could access an unknown part of himself through the patterns and shapes he drew with his hands – a therapeutic technique later developed by the Jungian analyst Dora Kalff as an aid to by-passing the thinking mind and unlocking the creative, healing power of the psyche.
In the heady summer of 1968, graffiti appeared all over Paris as the city rioted, which boldly declared, ‘Beneath the streets, a beach!’ The poetic slogan, invented by the writer and filmmaker René Viénet, was a call to escape the stifling conditions of capitalist society; its binary thinking, towering hierarchies and asymmetric power systems through invoking the freedom, escape and play associated with beaches as a revolutionary act.
Legs, tails & manes
According to the Archive for Research into Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS) ‘Book of Symbols’, beaches represent the transformational threshold between consciousness and dream.
Whether a place on a map or a state of mind
‘psychologically the beach evokes for us the daily experience of the slim shore between conscious and unconscious lapped and buffeted, shifted and changed, temporarily submerged and once again delineated in the tidal rhythms of waking and sleeping. There are ‘deposits’ from dream and fantasy, the play of imagination, the clarity of awareness… As the perspective and rhythms of the beach and the movement between water and land can liberate one’s feelings and expand one’s sense of space, time and being, so does the exchange between the depths of the psyche and consciousness.’
It was while thinking about how I could explore this exchange between psyche and consciousness that I wrote a story inspired by one of my favourite beaches. The beach in question, Praia Ursa, (Portuguese for bear) is named after the pair of distinctive rocks, which from a certain angle, in a certain light, look like a mother bear leading her cub into the Atlantic ocean.
According to legend, hundreds of millions of years ago the coastline was a river of frozen ice, whose glaciers were roamed by mammoths and bears. When the ice began to melt, the animals were told to leave by the gods. But this one mother bear refused. Reluctantly, the gods granted her wish to stay but only on the condition that she and her child be turned into rocks.
In my story, called ‘Mother Bear’ after the myth, a woman wanders a beach in her search of a lost child, who may or may not be real. Hours turn into days and days into weeks until the woman loses track of time altogether. As the coastline shifts and changes, so does she. A string of knotty muscles appear on her shoulders. Her chest widens and her neck thickens. Large purple veins bulge on her limbs. Her skin begins to gleam with a coat of red fur.
Under the trance of this eternal beach, the woman imagines she can see her lost child out at sea. The story ends as she leaps, part human, part bear, into the waves. While it was through this writing process that I was able to go to the beach of my mind and meet with the unknown of my wild inner selves.
Another beach, another dream. I’m lying beneath the crumbling slabs of a sandstone cliff when I hear the sound of approaching hooves, distant at first and then getting louder. I look up to see a woman riding a white horse bareback onto the sand. The whole beach stops to watch, transfixed, as woman and horse gallop into the waves before disappearing in a white spume of legs, tails and manes.
If you liked ‘All The White Horses’ please ‘heart’ & share so others can find it
Depth-writing prompts:
Write a response to one or more the following slogans - ‘beneath the streets, a beach’; ‘never turn your back on the ocean’; ‘making your unknown known is the important thing’. And/or write your own slogan.
Write in detail about a favourite beach. Or visit one and write in place. Use all your senses. What did or does this beach reveal?
Write in response to the above painting of a beach at night by Georgia O’Keeffe. What do you see? What does it symbolise to you? What is it saying? What story is it telling?
Online Depth-Writing Workshop - Monday August 19th, 7pm-8.15pm GMT
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