Underwater

I spectacularly poorly dressed for today. Tokyo calfskin shoes and a suede jacket. And sunglasses. It was dry when I left the house, though the air smelt of water. Then it rained, hard, for eight and a half hours. Shoes and coat? Sad, mishapen wrecks now drying on radiators. That's what you get when you ignore your nose.

Reading Gibson might have been a mistake. As soon as you start populating your head with characters like his, your own dopamine pathways get all corrupted, and you start seeing patterns yourself.

Today's was easy: drowned cities. From all sides, today, came news of lost villages at the bottom of lakes; flash-floods spilling over the M4 to strand holiday traffic; kayaks on town streets in Berkshire; scientists reckoning sea level will rise by 9 inches, now they've factored in isostatic readjustments, and, oh yes—did you know that the English Channel was carved out by an apocalyptic bursting of a giant superlake, millions of years ago?

And while all these things were noted, the rain continued to bury the streets in half an inch of bubbling water, break shop canopies, make the Cam a thick, café-au-lait surge, thick with broken branches and sodden undergrowth. Cambridge was as apocalyptic as ever I've seen it, and there I was, discussing Gibson, while the rain struck the pavement behind our chairs with such violence that we were chatting and drinking coffee in cold mist.

I can't imagine for one moment the real-life horror of a flooded city, qua Katrina. But drowning cities have a life of the mind, too. They crop up all over the place. Not just in stories of drowned lands: Atlantis, for example, or Ys, off the coast of Wales. Cities that are today's cities, utterly changed by rising waters (or drowned by sand, as in Ballard) are a staple of speculative fiction. Steve Erickson has a drowned Los Angeles in Rubicon Beach:

We came into L.A. middusk. Behind us the sky was yellow and black and the city was blue and orange. It took us two hours sailing in, past the blank smoky moors of the Hollywood Peninsula to our north, navigating our way through the outlying swamps where the Hancock Park mansions loomed in ruin, sea water rolling in and out of the porticoes around the doors. Sometimes in the upper floors of a couple of the big houses you could catch a light burning, which would suddenly go out as our boat neared—squatters hushing their fires because they thought we were the feds. On an island to the south stood a large empty hotel. We crossed the rest of the lagoon into Downtown and then up the main canal. I could see the smaller canals trickling off between the buildings which were black like the mansions behind us, and there was a sound from the Chinese storefronts along the water. What's that sound, I said to someone on board?

I’m off to Southwold next week, for a week of seaside and calm. Like all the towns along the outer rim of Suffolk's sandy coast, it has the look of a condemned man in its eye. I can't help but think that its recent flourishing as a kind of Islington-on-Sea, with its derelict schools, its expensive holiday homes, its shiny sports cars and ridiculous delicatessens, is partly a fast bit of late-capitalist existentialism, because Southwold will fall into the sea. Not this year, not next year, but look north up the coast and you distinctly see calving sand cliffs and the blanched antlers of oaks dead of thirst after the water table dropped, the edge of their field dissolved in the tide. There’s a road up there that drives straight over the edge of a cliff. There are warning signs, and pigfields and deserted churches, and twice a day the sea spills up and cuts further into the land. There's a guy with a house near here on a cliff who's been conducting a Canute-like battle for years, dumping truck-load after truck-load of builders' sand and rubble down the cliff in front of his house. Maybe one day his house'll be on an island, far out in the North Sea. He certainly hacks off the holiday-makers, because the earth-trucks scare their Mercedes.

From the seafront, looking south, you can see a dully glowing white dome: Sizewell B nuclear power station. What possessed BNF to build a reactor here is beyond me. Maybe they thought the sea would wash it all away, like that rubbish bit in Spiderman Two where the Hudson "drowns" the fusion reaction. Pah. The drowned city of Dunwich is between Southwold and Sizewell, a vast port that disappeared. All that's left are a few village houses, and half a graveyard. And just next to Sizewell is Minsmere: farmland flooded to deter invasion in WWII, still littered with long, snaky lines of concrete tank-stopping cubes.

All sorts of crap has been talked about the meaning of water over the years. Purification, clarity, blah. Gaston Bachelard wrote a whole book about this stuff. And of course, there's the other thing. Those "know yourself" guided visualisation exercises always make me giggle, because they invariably insist that water represents sexuality. That's all. No dice. "You turn the corner and see water: what does it look like?" (Yippee if you answer "a huge lake" or "a raging torrent in spate, full of salmon heading upstream". Embarrassed silence if you answer "an unopened bottle of Evian" or "a tray of icecubes.")

But this sense of land disappearing under water, and of flooded cities where the upper stories of buildings are the only habitable places, and everything below is gone; where streets become canals, and the familiar architecture of the city becomes something else entirely? This is something much richer, to do with memory, and history, and things being erased. And also because time is experienced — or at least, is assumed to be experienced — differently underwater, things slow right down and history stops: underwater, the basements of houses, with all the unconscious baggage that the term suggests, become inert, in stasis. Different, too. Bachelard said a lot of things about houses, as well as water, and I'm dreading the worry that I might have to re-read him to make sense of this. He really bugs me.

More when I've thought more.