In one sense, none of this is new. The immensity of the ocean’s scale and significance has been both embraced and recoiled from for millennia. Poets from ‘Beowulf’ (via Seamus Heaney, 1999) – ‘the ocean lifted / and laid me ashore’ – to Adrienne Rich (1973) – ‘And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair / streams black, the merman in his armored body’ – have hauntingly expressed humanity’s polarised entanglements with the sea. But it is also new: there has been a tsunami of publications, exhibitions, and symposia on oceanic meanings in the last few years, including the National Museum of Australia’s beautiful exhibition and catalogue on the 1800–04 Nicolas Baudin voyages, The Art of Science (2016); marine conservationist Jonathan White’s much lauded book Tides: The science and spirit of the ocean (2017); and Sydney University’s interdisciplinary and experimental international conference, Sustaining the Seas (2017).

The essays, poetry, and images curated in Tidalectics continue this interest in spanning and probing our ambiguous and conflicted relationships with the sea. The book’s title is a neologism from Barbadian poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite, coined to refuse the linear inevitability of ‘dialectics’, proposing instead an unresolved cycle, a tidal pulse and rhythm. Because most of us are earthbound, terrestrial, in language and in being, attempting to reach an oceanic worldview requires many such refusals, inversions, alterities, and paradoxes to our grounded cultural and political assumptions. In the context of the radically changed understandings of the fixity and stability of Earth systems, and their associated political and social structures engendered by the concept of the Anthropocene, the book’s contributors suggest the ample metaphor and fact of the ocean as an alternate structure of thought. The increasingly rigid line of thinking, from the Enlightenment to modernism and capitalism, has gridded and disciplined and subdivided the planet. This tradition does not give us useful tools to navigate a destabilised present and future. Tidalectics’ editor, Stefanie Hessler, argues for an oceanic thinking to ‘add nodal nexuses enabling a complex thinking that transcends separations’ – recognising the ocean as connector, not separator.

Nearly thirty contributors engage across subjects from insurance to indigeneity, wave physics to poetry, law to algae, most of them acute and revelatory. The essays are brief and focused. While most contributors are senior academics, the writing is accessible, sometimes conversational, and often inspirational. The collection usefully includes classic works. Rachel Carson in 1937 writes poetically of the ‘sea’s children’, and Epeli Hau‘ofa in 1993 inverts the received wisdom that Oceania is many small dependent islands of limited possibilities, and is instead a large sea full of possibilities and reciprocal connections. The central essays for me came from writers skillfully mapping these inversions of perspective that oceanic thinking might give us.

Cynthia Chou takes us to the world of Orang Suku Laut, the sea nomads of Southeast Asia, introducing their understanding of themselves living within a sentient ecology, an intentional world. This is of course correct. Humans are not the only active, thinking agents on the planet, not the only beings with a subject position: ‘they perceive the ocean as a source of knowledge from which humans should seek revelation … Truths inherent in the ocean will be revealed … only if humans advance their sensory education.’ Astrida Neimanis considers the paradoxical threats and impacts inherent in the notion of the Anthropocene and asks, ‘are we really that small, and that large?’ She highlights how we insist that the planet-marking human signature is only relevant if measured in stone, in geological stratigraphy, and asks instead about oceanic archives. The physical fact of the water cycle suggests that the water we touch today is the same water formed at the birth of our wet planet, bearing witness to every moment since then, both preserving memory and also washing it away: ‘not all that is significant leaves a durable trace, nor should everything be remembered’.

Flotilla at Lahad Datu Water Front, Borneo 2010 (photo by Torben Venning for Bajau Laut Pictures via Wikimedia Commons)

Both of these essays connect to the improbable argument that the ocean is like a radio, broadcasting waves. Stefan Helmreich makes this pitch: that waves transmit energy and information about events occurring often far distant and in the past, and also from the future: ‘waves that move with the winds of human-made climate change, waves that come to life in a newly melted … Arctic Ocean’. The program on Radio Ocean contains both music and documentary, the songs of crustaceans and cetaceans, as well as the inundation of living human communities.

The message I draw from this collection is one that inverts a human command-and-control solution to present and impending planetary unravelling. It challenges us to recognise that the emperor has no clothes, and instead asks for inter-species solidarity, for collaborative survival, for embrace of inescapable precarity and indeterminacy, for approaches that support life but recognise its ephemerality. As contributor Francesca von Habsburg argues, we should consider ‘changing ourselves, before we attempt to change the world’.

Reception by villagers of Omadal Islands, a Malaysian island located in the Celebes Sea on the state of Sabah (photo by Torben Venning for Bajau Laut Pictures via Wikimedia Commons)

The book is one outcome of a series of projects – residencies, ocean voyages, commissioned research and artworks, an exhibition – generated over six years from 2011, and curated and edited by Stefanie Hessler for the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary TBA21-Academy, self-described as the only Western arts organisation entirely dedicated to work on climate change and oceans. The physical form of the book uses a rhythm of black and white pages to reflect tidal complementarities, the design meant to instantiate the meaning. While this works, the hardback format with lots of black detracts from the inspiration and beauty of the words and images.

Environmental and climate analyses reveal that the world’s oceans are paradoxically highly vulnerable to human impact and unlimited in their capacity to make humans vulnerable. There has been much writing over the last decade on these ocean risks and possibilities. This volume presents and condenses key currents in this thinking and is both an explanatory chart and an inspirational compass for navigating these waters.