Learning with the Ocean
I can leave a seminar room and be in the water in 30 minutes if I drive quickly. North and south coast. It is a privilege that I do not take for granted. Recently, following an exam period which saw the end of my second year of study, I arrived at a state of burn out, the pressure I put on myself building to an almost unbearable level. Nothing I wrote felt engaging enough, compelling enough. I left my exam on the 18th century half written, unproofed and unreferenced on the laptop screen and I drove towards the sea.
I sat at South Fistral, watching rogue sets roll into a line up dominated by men scratching onto fat waves in the drizzle. I picked my way across the rocks, gingerly avoiding the sharpened crags. It was big, wobbly, and cold, the swell arriving at the beach in a weird direction. However, there was something comforting about letting go of all control, being powerless in a situation where I was at the hands of something much bigger. Nothing else really seems to matter when you’re being held down for slightly too long, or paddling into something that feels slightly too big, the exam and any thoughts of an academic future felt refreshingly far away.
This was a habit that began early on in my time at Exeter. In late September 2021, I sat in my first seminar room. The surfaces of the table were still slick with sanitiser, with students sitting far apart. ‘So, how are you all, really?’ was the chosen ice breaker from the module convenor. ‘I mean think about it’ they said, ‘You’ve all lived through 9/11, a national recession, Brexit, a pandemic, and now you’re all here in masks and it’s likely you won’t know what the entirety of your peers’ faces look like by the end of the year. And you’re paying nine grand for it all. I paid three grand for three years of undergraduate education.’ Unsurprisingly, nobody responded. The future looked unavoidably bleak.
Needless to say, I left that first seminar disheartened, with a cloyingly familiar ache of doubt creeping into my mind. I was returning to university having dropped out of the English course 3 years prior. Of course, it was a big decision returning to university for many reasons, and this opening comment did not fill me with relief that I’d made the right decision. So I did what felt natural, I returned to my car and drove to the north coast. There was a light easterly wind and a dying swell, the first of the autumn after a long, flat summer. It was a perfect way for me to quell the rising panic in my chest I was feeling as I drove away.
After the lacklustre start of that first seminar, I did not expect to find the same unfiltered joy that I experience in the ocean in the classroom. Instead it has been the opposite. There have been countless moments over the last two years at Exeter where it feels like there have been audible, almost mechanical clicks occurring in my brain when things finally fall into place, where I have been able to listen and sometimes participate in engaging discussions that are attentive to complexity, lead thoughtfully by lecturers and students. I value these moments immensely, and I now cannot imagine a future without them.
However, with the prospect of postgraduate study looming on the horizon, the pressure I put on myself is mounting at an accelerating rate. When submitting the last paper of a recent intense exam period, as the webpage reloaded I felt only dread, not relief. Since then I have spent a little more time in the water than usual, as much as work allows.
The time I spend in the ocean is the only time that the incessant narrative of academic success that replays constantly in my head seems to quieten. I am not thinking of the future, only what is immediately in front of me, or approaching imminently on the horizon.
Over the last two years as a student at Exeter, I have found more and more that my time spent in the ocean and the relationship I have built with it has become intertwined with the way I approach university work. We read Derek Walcott’s ‘The Sea is History’ in a recent module, a poem that served as the impetus for continued interest in thinking about the Atlantic Ocean through an essential postcolonial framework. Walcott imagines the Atlantic, as ‘a grey vault’, where memory and trauma is ‘locked up’.
The Atlantic is fraught with narratives of oppression, slavery, of history, it is ‘heavy with chaos’. I continue to remind myself that when I enter the Atlantic here in Cornwall, it is a privilege that I can enter it as a neutral space, as a balm for my anxieties.
I do not have ancestral trauma of transatlantic passages associated with the water. When I paddle out into a line up, I am welcomed and accepted, I am lucky. This is an awareness I want to implement into my own research, I always seem to circumnavigate back to the role of these natural spaces within my research for essays, examining them eco critically through a postcolonial lens.
Who ‘gets’ to enjoy and benefit from these natural spaces, and what narratives they occlude in our understanding of them within literature are essential questions in the Environmental Humanities that can also be applied to our understanding of the sea on our doorstep in Cornwall.
