A beach of shells

For the past couple of weeks, I've been painting shells that I've collected in recent years on the beaches near St. Augustine. First, three small watercolors, each one of a different scallop, with a tiny smooth shell beneath. On July 4, I started a much larger painting, of many shells, arranged on a plain page; the impetus for this arrangement seemed to come from some deeper place in my subconscious. Why? I wondered, as I finalized the composition and set pencil to paper. What am I doing here?

The Fourth of July came on the heels of two other national holidays - Quebec's St-Jean-Baptiste on June 24, and Canada Day on July 1. The separatists always come out in force for La Fête St-Jean, along with the less-political French-Canadians who simply want to celebrate their heritage. By contrast, Canada - which turned 150 this year - barely seems to know what to do to celebrate itself, since the question "What is Canada?" often yields only amorphous answers, or stereotypes involving parkas, snowshoes, hockey, and beer.

On Canadian holidays I still feel mostly like the observer and recent, mid-life immigrant that I am. We went down to the Jacques-Cartier bridge on Canada Day to watch the fireworks, and the moment they finished, the heavens opened and there was torrential rain, drenching the thousands of people on the bridge in a few minutes. I looked around: as usual for the fireworks, here was a microcosm of Montreal: French and English-speakers, Indians, Asians, Middle-Easterners, Africans; older people like ourselves, family groups, teenagers in packs, couples with small children and babies. Everyone was laughing and chattering in their own languages, and smiling at the strangers near them. The initial dash to get off the bridge soon turned to a slow splashing stroll, and a kind of collective merriment. I was so wet I could feel water streaming down my legs inside my jeans from my soaked underwear; like almost everyone else, we had no umbrella, no hoods or jackets. By the time we finally got to our bikes, at the end of the bridge, the downpour had stopped, and we cycled home. Now, that experience seemed Canadian: the lack of drama or hysteria, the acceptance of nature's unpredictability, the good mood in the face of it. But you can't encapsulate that, it's merely a feeling, one that I not only recognize from being here for more than a decade, but share -- like a lot of other inexpressible things about Canada and Quebec -- because it feels natural to who I am, to who I've always been.

America, on the other hand -- what was anyone to make of July 4th this year?  The celebratory spirit seemed muted, but I felt even more removed than usual, and wrote to a friend that I felt I was "done with nationalisms of any kind."

 

Instead I stood at my work table that day and made the careful, detailed under-drawing for the new painting, and thought about the beach above St Augustine: a shell beach, with a perfect gradation from intact shells close to the water's edge, to smaller and smaller water-worn pieces, and finally coarse shell-sand forming the dunes. Each one of those shells, I realized, represented one organism, one life, in numbers that seemed much more profound than the clichéd impossibility of "counting the grains of sand." Who was I, I wondered, in the face of all those lives that had been lived: one human in the year 2017, bending down to pluck a dozen shells from the beach and put them into her pocket to bring back to Canada, far to the north, a cold place surrounded my frigid oceans where not one of those organisms could have survived for very long?

 Maybe, I thought, the multiple shells in the new painting represented some sort of subconscious move away from a focus on the individual, brought on by my reflections about July 4th and America. The shells are a sample that represents an entire beach, which in turn is a sample that represents the life of an ocean. They have characteristics and vital needs in common, yet are extraordinary and beautiful in their uniqueness.

Later, though, as I worked, I began to realize that the shells in the painting were also symbols for me of the refugees who have arrived on Mediterranean beaches, both dead and alive: people we have labelled collectively but who are -- as a few striking images have shown us - individuals with personal and deeply-affecting stories.

I wrote more about nationalism, immigration, and politics, but on re-reading deleted it: too heavy-handed, and maybe even too obvious.

Let's just say that the more I travel and the more people I meet from all over the world -- all of us arriving, some more battered than others, on these beaches of our lives -- the more I see my personal story as one of many, and that our shared humanity is a far greater connection than any arbitrary division, especially when it is those divisions that are so often responsible for conflict and exodus. I'm much more interested these days in trying to express my feelings about the interconnected world, which includes the preciousness of each anonymous human and non-human life. As the poet Gary Snyder wrote: “The size of the place that one becomes a member of is limited only by the size of one’s heart.”