SEA SWALLOW’D
Transcript
2010

[Sounds of sea splashing and a female voice humming]

Gregory: The sea had just swallowed him up. Queer.

[“Sea Swallow’d”]

[“A Film in Irregular Chapters”]

[“The Lee Shore”]

Gregory: I have some memories.

Helen: The first moment I saw you, I just wasn’t sure. I wanted to leave before you saw me. I got up to go, but just then you spotted me and I pretended I was just stretching my legs and waving my chair. “Oh! I was just stretching my legs” I said, “I was just waving my chair”. And you said, “Really? Because it looked to me as if you were just about to go”. And I said, “Oh really? No! Not at all! Not a bit of it, no!”

Joseph: A woman stands on a wooden chair at the edge of the sea. The legs of the chair are slowly sinking into the wet sand. The woman does not seem to notice. She is preoccupied with trying to send the sea back. The woman’s task is completely hopeless of course, we all know that. We all know that you can’t stop the sea.

[Sounds of birds singing and insects flying past]

Sarah: I knew an old lady that swallowed a fly. She’s dead of course.  I find that rather sad.

[“Cutting In”]

[Sounds of distorted music and beeping]

Helen: And that sense of darkness and a dark place and a powerful place and a churning place, a place that is full of movement and that even if it’s lying still, erm, that it is a very very deep stillness and that anything could set it off, could set off a churning and a, you know, and a spilling out and a swallowing up, like the sea.

[whispering] I love you inside out.  I love your bones and your blood and your bile and I love the shape of your organs and the dark brown colour of your liver and I love the sloosh and spill of your liquids.

Dr Aziz: If you feel your way inside important things, you often feel that this is a bit too much for you.
Gregory: Feelings that are hard or difficult to take.

[“The First Lowering”]

[Sounds of moving science equipment, sighing]

Helen: There was like a weird warmth of them being on top of me, in a sense like they’d made like a little warm place, erm, and they were really heavy and I found my stomach really contracting with the reaction to that big shapes – well the stomachs were heavy and then there was that really big thing, I don’t know what it was, a liver or a kidney. It was really heavy and there was the smell of course of , erm,  I think the stomach – there was something about the shape and the colour of the stomach, erm, yeah.

[Sounds of a bell tolling]

[“Heads or Tails”]

Sarah: You don’t have a gut feeling when you think, “God, I must go to bed with a sherry”. You have a gut feeling when you think, “I’m going to go out with a spade”

Dr Aziz: When we really talk about gut feelings, we’re probably not talking about the sensory events that are actually happening in the gut. Being a gastroenterologist I know that there is a nervous system within the gut called the “enteric nervous system” and that nervous system has been called the “little brain of the body” or the “second brain” so the big brain being the brain we have in our skull and the little brain that we have being the gastrointestinal. Therefore there is this bio-direction communication going on and there is evidence that particularly softened or sensory information going up via the enteric, goes to the same sort of emotional centres in the brain that control our inner momentary emotions so that it is possible that when we have a certain situation and we have to make a judgement and we say that we have a gut feeling about something that there is actually a certain perception that is actually being generated or communicated between the gut and the brain.

There are some people who have a freeze response to a stressful event. The more neurotic you are, you are more likely to produce a freeze response and the more extrovert you are, the more likely you are to produce a fight or flight response.

[Sounds of a flock of birds]

[“A Bosom Friend”]

Natasha: Ok, this is what the old man told me and, erm, it was I think towards the end of his life, he was quite ill and I would say that when people tell you something like that at that time of their life it’s probably true. It happened somewhere around that bay – can you see that? So they started all the way up the hill, they suddenly appeared and started fencing using just swords, like they were completely mad, enraged with each other. They fought like they didn’t see the world around them and they were going further and further and came all the way to the sea and I thought they would stop but they didn’t notice the water, they just walked into the water and kept fencing and fencing and hitting each others’ swords and I just couldn’t believe it – how could they breathe? And they just didn’t notice anything and in the end you could just see the top of each head and you could see the water splattering around their swords as they kept fighting and then for a while you could just see that the water kept moving like there was something happening underneath but you couldn’t see them in the water anymore and then it just got completely calm and, well, the most surprising thing was, when they got them out you couldn’t disentangle their bodies and their swords from each other. The swords were completely locked. Love, I think and love is what they said.

[In the sand: “I hate your guts”]

[“The Spirit Spout”]

Archive Female Voice 1: Mr Pierce, may I interrupt you in your work for a moment? Where were you born? Were you very young when you started?

Geoff: But when you consider it and think about it, there’s that feeling inside of you that you really want to do it.

[Music]

Rene: And, erm, I had this very deep feeling for quite a while.

Dr Aziz: So maybe when there is an intense emotion or an intense feeling we do have a sensory event, which occurs in the gut.

Geoff: So that initial romantic feeling I had was right.

Dr Aziz: So this is, I think, by and large anecdotal. There is obviously very little evidence or data as to exactly what a gut feeling is. It is a bit of a chicken and an egg situation which is very difficult to work out.

[“Pitchpoling”]

[Sounds of a helicopter and metal detector]

Helen: The moment I saw you I knew it was too late.

[Sounds of hitting a tennis ball and bells tolling]

Claudia: The whale watches the jumpers from Beachy Head. The whale is most interested in the moment before the jump. Now would be a good moment to jump, a shining moment. In this particular light it would be heroic, poetic. It would look amazing. The soles of the shoes sink their teeth into the white side of the cliff and grip on. The whale watches a few tiny white crumbles of chalk roll down the cliff like miniature snowballs. The sun has gone in and the sky is leaden grey.

Leslie: I think the most dramatic thing I ever witnessed in my whole childhood was that day when something went wrong with the sword swallower’s act. Erm.

Helen: Well I like the idea of danger, I like the idea of something being in there that you know, you see it with your eyes but you can’t believe it and also the idea of rupture to the gut.

[Sound of sword]

[“The Castaway”]

Sarah: She’s fully dressed and wears a string of pearls around her neck. It is early evening and the tide is coming in.

Leslie: What was it like when you were on the lilo in the sea?

Helen: There is the movement of the water. Tiny waves come in from the side. I stare up at the sky and time goes by in uneven chords. I’m out here with the lost mariners, the castaways, the shipwrecked and the sea-swallowed. The lilo is full of my breath, it gives me a sense of achievement, floating out here on my own breath, on hundreds and hundreds of exhales. As long as my breath lasts I’ll be able to float.

I found this piece of film inside the belly of a whale and I pulled it out of the whale’s mouth through its lips and I think it had been lying inside the whale for such a long time coiled up like a snake that when I pulled it out it still would spring back into that coil shape and when I hold it up to the light I can see that the sides of the film are encrusted with salt and as I tip it backwards and forwards I can see scales of fish flashing over the surface of the film.

[“Surmises”]

Gregory: Let’s take the story and build it up slowly.

[Bell tolls the hour]

[Seagulls]

Gregory: Let’s take the story and build it up slowly. One has a nervous system in which impulse comes together from many organs to leave traces and these are interacting to all account.

Helen: It’s about dark green secrets from the belly of the sea. Fishermen who went out one day in the early morning and they never came back.

[whispering] I love you inside out.

Geoff: Like falling moments.

Rene: I had this very deep feeling for quite a while.

Helen: It’s about stories of fights, of fights to the death, of setting sail, never to return. Of stories of staying fast, of holding on, of taking the last dance in the setting sun on the prom.

Leslie: It’s about things that were cast off and hidden and tossed into the ocean and regurgitated.

Helen: And it’s about trying to explain why the first moment I saw you I knew I could love you.

Gregory: I have some memories

Helen: [whispering] And I love the sloosh and the spill of your liquids.

Leslie: This is the End

[“Einde”]

[Titles]

Leslie: It’s about love

Helen: It’s about…

Gregory: I must go. Goodbye I say and fare thee well. God help you Captain Gardiner. God forgive you Captain Ahab

[Sound of gulp]