Sea Space and Transcendent Encounter

Abstract

Sea space substitutes an optical equivalent of auditory perception for the normal visual experience. As tones do, the moving sea homogenizes space and creates values within the temporal horizon. The effect promotes the appearance of optical rhythm as a transcendent property which, coupled with the matching acoustical rhythm of the breaking waves, installs the observer in a continuous or prolonged present. A lifetime in this mode would convey the world permanently forming. Mythical statements of extraordinary transformations can be read as aesthetic responses to the lability of stimulus patterns at a time in a people's history when the transcendent mode is dominant, or at least most active. The sea is eminently labile and suggests infinite possibility. It cannot be dated and hints to us of eternity in our transcendent engagements with it.