I’ve loved the ocean for as long as I can remember. I’m not sure exactly why. Perhaps it’s because, unlike nature’s more wispy basic elements like suffering or air, the sea is a solid, tangible viscera that literally connects everything on the planet to everything else, the true blue blood that humbles king and fool alike. It’s pretty cool, if you think about it.

You can wade into the water at Cape Point and feel the shock of the same primal current that sends sparks flying in soaked spring break bikini bottoms at Fort Lauderdale and fizzes at the shins of a spearfisherman in Papa New Guinea’s thinning shallows, or lights up the eyes of some ageing Asian couple sifting through the pebbles of memory on Brighton Beach. It’s cold and cruel and vast and sweet, and whenever I venture out into the waves it makes me feel that I am plugging into some greater collective fluid Flesh, home and whole in the spilled alphabet soup of existence.