Night & Water

An occasional, unfortunate and awkward by-product of a liking for night-time walks along and gazing into the many waterways of Cork city, particularly along the main docklands area, is to be accosted by a well-meaning type of soul who seems absolutely convinced that gazing into a city river by night must denote a suicidal desire to jump into said river. And maybe I shouldn't complain as just such interventions by strangers have surely salvaged quite a few momentarily broken human soldiers from such desperate actions. On the once or twice occasions when just such events have happened nothing I can say seems to convince the good Samaritan that suicide is not on my mind, and a somewhat comical passage of interaction occurs- one trying to convince the other not to kill himself, the other vainly trying to explain that there is an aesthetic pleasure to gazing into moving water, which is the full dynamic of the events the other mistakenly construes as verging on the imminently tragic. Perhaps it all comes from at source a certain type of person brought up in the heart of the country transplanted to the strange urban landscape, and its more unnatural and neurotic relationship with the natural world.

Anyway, no such event quite occurs on the following evening when, smoking a cigarette in a particularly remote spot, looking across at a ship in time-slowing manner ponderously turn and face out towards sea, I was thinking- and I think I really was- how much of a Tarkovskian scene it was, and if I were a filmmaker...when I belatedly noticed rapidly approaching footsteps. A haggard and feverish looking man grabbed me by the arm, fixed his highly charged, at least half-mad eyes on me, and demanded, "What is your wisdom?"
I quickly understood the nature of the scene and, perhaps out of an intermingling mixture of sympathy and self-preservation, imparted the following: "Life is the incarnated space between appearance and disappearance; that is to say, birth and death. Appearance in this realm coincides with disappearance from another, whilst disappearance from this realm is instantly followed by appearance in another."
This, as I must have intuitively divined, proved to be especially helpful to the distressed man, whose taut features softened and gaze became becalmed. He thanked me, gaze me a cigarette and walked off, heading away from the city, while I turned back towards it.