Tourist markets laden with trinkets carry their own charge of melancholy, while seeing the objets’ provenance can be brutally sad. People in remote places labour long and hard to live by this trade. The sacks and bundles pile up in bamboo sheds or beneath a covering of dead palm fronds: the shells and corals dragged from the seabed and rotted out in heaps; the hardwood cigarette boxes stacked in piles; the sharks harvested for flesh and teeth, jaws and fins; the alligators stuffed; the baby porcupine fish inflated and lacquered; the aquarium fish poisoned.
Often it seems the more that people become urbanised, the more they want about them talismans of nature on their walls, their shelves, their keyrings. Many souvenirs are marks of pilgrimage, like religious relics, and denote travel. Many of these talismans come from the sea. They are tokens of lineage and are to Homo what a family crest is to an aristocrat. The blood line lives on. Yet perversely, this importing from one universe to another, from water to air, is invariably fatal. Nothing looks as dead as a seashell in suburbia, a piece of coral skeleton or a stuffed fish. The otherness of a shark’s tooth, like that of a fossil, begins to ebb the moment it is held in the hand. Objets trouvés should be marvelled at, then allowed to become perdus at once. Only thus can the transient pleasure of crossed trajectories be sustained in the memory.
The tourist’s trinkets and the traveller’s memorabilia so swiftly decay from prized objects into junk because they are never what they were believed to be. As pieces chipped from nature they have a status oddly close to that of a monument. Just as a monument purports to refer to the past but is always contemporary,* so the tourist’s relic constantly rewrites his version of its origin or the moment he acquired it. The more it tells him of his former self, the more silent it remains about its own past. A shark’s tooth is to the living actuality of the fish which once ate with it as a holiday photograph is to the scene it depicts. A wave washes over us as we hold them but it is not – as we imagine – a wave of cheerful or tearful recall. Such trinkets commemorate a moment not of acquisition but of loss. The tooth, the coral, the hardwood, the fish, were all wrenched from life so we can later discard them as the impedimenta of a previous self. From long experience we know this in advance, remembering the fate of souvenirs from former holidays even as we tell ourselves that this time they are authentic. But the things are already dead when we buy them; and their rattling into the dustbin later is the sound of our own hollow attempt to seize the ever-vanishing present.
In this way, our own deaths prey on the deaths of others. All mementoes immediately turn into species of fossils. The intricate tracery of a coral fan, torn last year from a seabed off Barbados and bleached for export, stands as mutely on a mantelpiece as the ribs of any Carboniferous leaf embossed on a piece of coal. Our psychic recognition that last summer might as well be 90 million years ago robes our trinkets in their characteristic sadness. Acts of memory are incapacitating, trapped as we are between souvenir and memento mori. When the objects have collected enough admiration and dust to force this recognition upon us, we throw them away or donate them convulsively to a museum.
But there is no reef after all. The swimmer pursued the dark shadow in the water, counting his strokes, until he realised it was receding at every stroke. He gave up and swam in what he hoped was the reverse direction until now he thinks he has returned to his original position.
Still no boat. It has made no effort to materialise during his brief absence. Maybe there never was one. Maybe he has been out here in this radiant deep for days, even weeks? Only the rope’s empty tugging at his ankle as he swam reminded him of how recently he had been anchored to his precious craft.
Surely the sun is lower than it was? For the first time he considers what it will mean to spend the night out here. He is not afraid of the dark, nor is he afraid of the sea at night. Yet out here the sharks are maybe not so timorous as they are in the shallower waters near a fringing reef. They like the freedom of a good depth beneath their bellies. Since he will be neither kicking nor struggling he has hopes of not attracting their attention. Like certain predatory humans, they are beautifully attuned to the sounds of distress. No; he will hang here quietly, counting the stars or trying to see the lights of land. Perhaps it will be impossible to resist peering into the Stygian, sparkling gulf he treads, even though the sight of a great swirl of luminescence turning suddenly in his direction might well herald his end. No doubt the strike will be shockingly abrupt, but for some reason he is more frightened by the thought of a first inquisitive tugging at the painter hanging beneath him like a bell-pull. He does not want to hear his own terror pealing out across an empty ocean. At all costs he will be stoical. Fishermen say shark attacks are painless. One feels great bangings and slammings but no actual pain.
This is stupid. It is still broad daylight and the boat has only just gone. There is no possible way in which it could have drifted more than 50 or 100 yards. A hundred and fifty at the outside. Well, he will not wait passively in the water until death in one form or another heaves up alongside to gulp him down. He will now try to swim a grid pattern. It will not be easy without any fixable starting point, but nevertheless he will try.
He heads for the sun, fifty strokes, then turns at what he calculates to be 90° and swims ten more; then another 90° and back parallel to his original course. He is pleased to find the surface of the water undulates more than he had thought. This convinces him that the chances of happening on the boat are excellent. No sooner has he thought this than, halfway along the new leg of his search pattern, he spies its prow. There is no question. No piece of water was ever that shape, black and slender and curved like a beak. With a cry he abandons the stupid grid and heads for it. Thank Christ, and about time too. That was close. God, that was close. Never, ever again will he do anything so damned stupidly careless. …
There is nothing. No prow, no boat, not even a length of floating timber. Nothing but empty water taking its shape from him. His grid is broken and lost. He will never find his original position now. He turns and turns in despair and dejection, incredulous to think he will not be seen ever again while the bloody boat will probably be wrecked on some inshore reef to gladden a poor beachcomber looking for useful spars and panels of marine plywood.
* This idea was developed by Mark Cousins in a lecture at the Architectural Association in London in March 1991.