I’ve been nursing on vistas like an unweaned babe. At residency after residency — Wyoming, Washington, Texas, and now Costa Brava — I’ve suckled on the extremities of beautiful terrain so that I in turn can give the world…what, exactly? Dismembered and disemboweled trees, branded with my interior conquests? Well, yes. Writing is a take-and-take, but one can always find worse — those whose taking fells whole mountains or coral reefs, like the ash of Vesuvius, officialized.

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Beauty nurses writers. Writing residencies know this. Thus, more than money or glory, it is dramatic landscapes that are conferred upon our penniless souls. But what riches they bring us! To stare out at crests and falls, tempests and tranquilities is to sire fresh equilibria to both sides of the creative gradient. On one side: suckling. On the other: vistas. On one: neuroses. On the other: epiphanies.

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Here at Sanià, it is the sea that feeds us. But the sea is off limits to writers. It’s more forbidden than the woods, the mountains, the great cities, even love and death. The sea’s eternity, fraternity, and warfare have made not just a mass but a violence of literature — a saltiness. Like an anchovy out of the tin, brackish myths pucker Western mouths and squelch Western faces. Too salty. How can we read anything more about the sea?

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The sea stirs the mind because it simulates the mind. The mind reaps the sea because it senses sodality. Finally another that is unceasingly moving, unceasingly frictional!

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I stand at the point where the sea meets the rocks like the voice meets the voice. Sometimes they crash. Sometimes they quarrel. Sometimes they slop. Sometimes they cuddle. Sometimes they splatter the inquisitor into the air like a compromise between brothers — between trident and thunderbolt. Always, they make sounds. For if silence falls upon the point where the sea meets the rocks, then something has died. Of course, the writer dies all the time. The sea never does.

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Watching the waves, I realize I prefer the crests, the tempests. The angrier the better. Often, large swells are only false starts, like yawns in limbo, coming, coming, coming. But the ones that crash bring flush and purgation. Tension breaks. Earth creates and destroys alone with itself, a blithe solipsism, like a child rubbing against the mattress, a theory of science best understood as a lullaby. I was once that child, rapaciously rubbing extremities against terrain — or was it terrain against extremities? Shy and recessive was little boy I. Might my latter-day lust for oceanic collisions redeem my boyhood effeteness? Might it masculinize my apperception? Might it retroactively implant in little boy I a smidgeon of the coarse, hoarse spectator in gladiatorial stands, cheering on brutality and bloodshed?

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In every minor rupture in the water, every peripheral flicker, I think I’ve missed a baleen whale, a short-beaked dolphin, a leatherback turtle, a monk seal, a flying fish, a blue shark’s fin. Why was my head down? Was that chalky foam just another wave crest? Was it just another rock, peeking arrhythmically out of the sea like the sheeny scalp of a drowning man? Or might I have missed a precious sighting, the fugacious regards from nether to ether, the whispered secrets of a mirrory sweep? Oh, how the downturned head pickles in the paranoia of seeing all but the seeable.

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I must stop with these maritime metaphors. I’m degrading myself. I’m surrendering to the gravity of gigantism. But the metaphors, like the waves, keep coming and coming. I want to keep looking, describing, prostrating. In the end, isn’t the sea a worthy antagonist? If I’m to bend over and show my rear — the rear of my nature — to a higher power, ought it not to be the sea?

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The sea brings me back to basic questions like psilocybin brings me back to childhood. What is a wave?

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Even in the most otherworldly of worldly empyreans, there are rhythms, bustles, things to be done, things to be eaten, tasks to be attended to, routines to be observed, habits to be indulged. Even empyreans have their preoccupations. Beauty, I suppose, must have something to do.

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I also must have something to do. Thus I want to jump into the sea. I want to wash myself in aquamarine. I want to inseminate myself with an undertow. I want to fecundate myself with fishiness. I want to snort the smack of brine and champ the frigid flesh of a dorado.

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On every walk, my foot slips an inch off a cliff, and I resent the reign of Eros. What is a death drive but a diving for pearls? Let the sea carry me away! Alas, in my ecclesiastical prudence, I only toe the shore. In my compensatory ventures, I only trap myself in minorly rising waters. My jeans get wet, my calves get wet, and at night, my blankets become the sea, washing over me, taking me to peaceful coral, to underwater caves. I study the storm strategies of fish so that as I fall asleep I can imagine I’m a fish caught up in a hurricane, sheltering in a cozy nook of my death drive, hundreds of feet below Eros’s terranean reign.

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There’s a resident here who starts every sentence with “I.” Happily, the sea’s “I” doesn’t sound like an “I”. It sounds like an “us.”

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When the sea slaps hard, it becomes campy, capriciously bitchy. The rocks become stalwart husbands and boyfriends, enduring moods, stone-faced.

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How did Iris Murdoch do it? In my mind, on my tongue, I’ve forded four dozen titles, none of which comes close to her crown. “The sea” said twice graces the sea’s lineaments more perfectly than any two words I can muster. Am I envious of Iris for envisaging the sea as she did? Am I envious of past residents who’ve virtuosically particularized Neptune, Varuna, Njord, Pontus? Who’ve called the sea “the third dog,” “blue noise,” “always and never the same”?

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I saw a young surfer walk from pavement to sand, sand to sea. He walked by me — me in my winter coat, my jeans, my hiking boots, my chastity, him in his sleek wet suit stretched over every vein and abdominal. He was tall and slim, the kind of slim that transmits strength, capacity, size, and girth. Frontward, I could see he had as much size and girth as any thrillseeking lad on the Spanish mainland. Backward, I could see a realist rump — a utilitarian fulcrum for plucky wrangles with Poseidon. Ah, to lock horns with this young man. Or to let him gore his horns into my death drive. As he moved from pavement to sand, sand to sea, making the connection, bridging the gap, nullifying the binary, jumping into the storybook water, then voyaging the waves with the amphibious aplomb of a muscular siren, I realized I could no longer write or think about the sea. I had to learn to surf. Adios.