By Nicola Sebastian

∞

Look, there are beginnings and endings everywhere—think of them as raindrops setting off ripples on a still pond, changing at each meeting point. Or better yet, focus your attention on a single droplet of water suspended in the air, setting off its own private rainbows, spectrums radiating every which way, deepening into reds and brightening into blues all at once, depending on the angle of your gaze. In other words, even the water and the air have their own stories to tell. How, then, should we listen?

~

Try watching water move across our spinning planet on your computer screen. Search for Perpetual Ocean, a video animation made by NASA of the ocean currents from June 2005 to December 2007. Nearly three years of never standing still. The ocean currents meander across the Pacific, dipping over and under the equator in tildes and curlicues—fancy words for little wavy lines that can’t stand to be straight. The restless strokes of white look like the wakes of ships seen from an airplane; or the jet streams of airplanes seen from a ship. Invert the world, and the sea pours into the sky.

~

*Joar Songcuya - The Sea Is Not a Quiet Place (2021), Oil on canvas, 122 cm x 183 cm*
Image description: The painting depicts dark, blue waves in an abstract style. In the bottom half of the painting, wave-like spirals in shades of blue are rendered in thick, swirling brushstrokes. In the upper half of the painting, loose brushstrokes in white, gray, and maroon resemble a foggy background.

One minute and fifteen seconds into the video, the moving lines hit the easternmost islands of the Philippines. Some of the water is channeled north towards Japan in the powerful Kuroshio Current. The black stream. Some of it is sent swirling south in an eddy the size of Mindanao, our second biggest island.

On my touchpad, I use my finger to trace our islands from north to south, seven thousand, six hundred and forty-one, as of the last count. Together they make a curving line, a wave that crests into the warmest and deepest waters in the world. The Western Pacific Ocean. A little farther east (but not yet the west) lies the Mariana Trench. The exponential negative of Mount Everest, five times the Grand Canyon. At its depth, commercial planes could reach cruising altitude, trailing their jetstreams through dark, rippling caverns. Not too deep, however, for plastic, which has been discovered in its valleys. To the roots of mountains I sank down… Jonah was in the belly of a giant whale when he said this [1]. Not underground; underwater.

From the deep rise cold spirals of water carrying nutrients produced by the tube worms and bottom feeders of the world. This rich sediment feeds the fish larvae and plankton that ride the Kuroshio Current to their next habitat, settling here and there, from the Luzon Strait to Taiwan, wherever they get stuck, really, for the next stage of their growth. This motley array of microscopic drifters turn light into food, pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and replace it with oxygen, sustaining everything from fish spawn to blue whales. A floating nomadic rainforest, foregoing roots for blossoms as it swirls across a liquid, changeable surface.

Wherever there is an upwelling of water, life abounds. In return, the surface sends down its dead. A single whale falls to the bottom of the sea, and all who dwell there will feed for years. In turn, all beings turn into nutrients. This endless movement of the ocean from the spectacle of its shimmering surface to its utmost, unfathomable depths and back is essential to life. The sea promises not life alone, nor death, but an inexorable spiraling cycle of both.

~

Meanwhile, warm air churns the sky into clouds. And sometimes, especially during the northeastern monsoon, Amihan, the warm air doesn’t stop churning until the clouds have turned into typhoons, heading west. Amihan is also the name of the bird who rescued the first human beings, Malakas and Maganda, from the bamboo plant in which they were trapped. Thus freed, the man named Strength and the woman named Beauty went together into the world. Does difference create freedom, the ability to choose? And if so, does that mean sameness is the same as being stuck, staying in one place?

Was it also Amihan that brought the Portuguese-born, Spanish-funded explorer Magalhães to the Philippines? Based on the journal of his Italian companion Antonio Pigafetta, he arrived just in time for the monsoon, although climate, like any pattern, shifts over time.

We have passed over the Philippines from April to June of 2007. The elapsed time in the video is about ten seconds.

~

A comet jettisons dirt and gas as in its voyage across space. It completes another fifteen to seventy-year-turn around the galaxy, only to keep on going. 2013 is the year of the comets, astronomists said, due to the proximity of two comets that year. They would have been the brightest objects in the sky that anyone living has ever seen. That is, if they don’t get too close to the sun, and fall apart. Sungrazers, they’re called, and I think of cows digesting sunlight; I think of fingers fluttering out of a moving vehicle, flirting with the night. Go out and, in the evening sky, especially in the first week of March, look to the west. It will pop out. It will look like a blob, a fuzzy star, and you should be able to see a tail sticking upward from the horizon.

Ship, plane, or comet; the stream of white trailing after it does not seem to move so much as grow, the vessel standing still as its wake unfurls long and longer behind it. Why does change seen from far enough away appear as patterns and paint strokes, already half-finished?

~

The typhoon begins in the North Pacific, near the island of Pohnpei, Micronesia. The typhoon begins with unseasonably warm waters—four to five whole degrees Celsius over the average. 2013 is also the hottest year in more than one hundred and sixty-three years that wasn’t caused by the El Niño weather phenomenon. The water warms the air, the air rises, the rising air leaves a void. To fill the void, more air rushes in. The whole thing repeats, and then starts to swirl. Clockwise, because we’re north of the equator. Go south and it’s counterclockwise, which is not the case for toilet bowls. The air is warm and wet, and then cold and wet, and then clouds. More clouds. More heat. Big wind. An eye that doesn’t need to blink; that notices nothing. The warm cold wet swirling air is now a typhoon.

~

The world watches as the typhoon heads west across the Pacific Ocean, bound for the Philippines.

Satellite images show a spiral of wind and water 800 kilometres wide. Its eye is nine kilometres in diameter. Around the eye: small tornadoes circling. Mesovortices, they’re called. On weather maps, millions of pairs of eyes track the eye as it deepens from blood red to pitch black, like a hole burned into film. No weather map has shown a typhoon eye with this much black, ever. It is a super typhoon, the categorization meteorologists use for storms with winds greater than 190 kilometres per hour. This one’s winds clock in at 300 kilometres per hour, which is the same speed as a shinkansen bullet train slicing through Tokyo.

The sound you hear as the train passes you by is the air being split by a fast-moving point. Perhaps all wounds are simply a form of displacement, of moving matter to one side, or the other. Where you end up depends on how the wound moves you. Here, or there.

~

*Joar Songcuya - Dancing Waves (2021), Oil on canvas, 92 cm x 92 cm*
Image description: The painting is rendered mostly in shades of orange. Near the center is a spiral of thick, swirling brushstrokes in bright orange. The spiral fades outwards into softer, free strokes in pale tones. Towards the top of the painting are loose strokes in cool colors.

Like any good epithet, descriptions of typhoons often resort to hyperbole. The term super typhoon is one such example. Unfortunately, meteorologists and reporters are at a loss as to how to impress upon us their seriousness, otherwise.

But the word typhoon is a hyperbole in itself, taken from the Chinese tai fung, or big wind. The Greek word, tuphon, also bears some familial resemblance. It means father of the winds.

Another possible ancestor is the Arabic word tufan, which means to turn round. Maybe the Pacific Ocean’s Ring of Fire is itself a cyclone, endlessly turning. Or better yet, a cycle that returns, like a season. What looks like snow in other parts of the world comes to ours, as rain. After all, the word monsoon originates from the Arabic word for season: mawsim, which comes to us by way of the Portuguese monção, and is shaped by yet another word: wasama, meaning to mark or brand, that is, to make something recognisable by giving it a symbol.

~

It’s easy enough to write about a typhoon in purple tones, if that’s how it’s been colored on a map. In the map I’m looking at now, the purple spirals out like a spool of thread, a heart of indigo giving way to hues of violet, magenta, seafoam green, aqua. In another it’s a baby blue eye with a white limbal ring, surrounded by a bloodshot sea. An ink stain from a fountain pen, true black fading to blue with the passing of time. A huge head of white cotton candy, spun around a cardboard tube.

I can’t imagine. This is what people say, when faced with devastation. But imagining is the easy part. It’s not looking away that’s difficult.

The stratosphere is trying to imitate a whirling dervish. The stratosphere is terribly good at it.

The Milkway, I’d always say whenever you poured milk into a cup of hot tea. Cool white swirling into steaming amber. How you would smile, watching my delight at the sight of this. Sometimes I think I played it up, knowing how much you enjoyed my enjoyment, our delight mirroring each other, growing in tandem.

Seen from space, all typhoons are beautiful. This one is perfect. One of the most powerful typhoons in recorded history spirals across the Western Pacific, headed straight for the Philippines. When it reaches our area of responsibility, it will be named Yolanda.

~

There are islands still farther east, but Samar is the hip bone that the Philippine archipelago juts out into the Pacific.

On November 8, 2013, Yolanda made landfall on Samar’s eastern shore, on a little finger of land called Guiuan.

Due west, Yolanda landed six times, trailing its arms across the lower half of the Philippines. The entire archipelago was engulfed in white. Twenty-four hours later, Yolanda dissipated somewhere over the South China Sea.

~

All Yolanda took was a day. And yet for each of the islands the typhoon visited, everything changed. The famous San Juanico bridge connecting the islands of Samar and Leyte was now under water, instead of suspending over it. Dogs flew, birds and monkeys hid in caves, and ships parked right in the middle of Tacloban City, in between the overturned cars and the roofless buildings. In Guiuan, the government weather station’s Doppler radar, a metal ball over two stories tall, was found on top of a local resort, a few kilometres away from its tower. Donated by the Japanese government four months prior, the radar had cost two million dollars, and was brand new.

~

With the same breath that metereologists affix super to typhoons in order to catalog never-before-seen intensities, they express doubts over the connection between climate change and the increasing frequency and ferocity of typhoons. Low confidence—this is how the UN panel on climate change viewed the proposed connection between human activity and typhoon patterns, the same year that Yolanda hit [2].

Unlike the polar ice caps, which hold the story of the world’s changing climate deep in their frozen core, typhoons, in true tropical form, are fast, fickle things. The data is inconclusive, not to mention incomplete. Metereologists have only been tracking typhoons since the 1980s, and mostly in the US. There are no Hurricane Hunters, the equipment used to track and measure such weather systems, in the Philippines. It’s no surprise then that the region where a connection between typhoons and climate change was first acknowledged is in the North Atlantic, off the US eastern seaboard.

In the subsequent decade, climate models have repeatedly pointed to a future where typhoons will increase significantly in intensity, if not in frequency. And, because the seas are rising, too, their effects will be ever more devastating. As super typhoons and biblical floods continue to inundate the world, the truth of this future is growing ever more prevalent. There’s even a growing subcommunity on YouTube that’s devoted to typhoon content. In one, the content creator spliced together the satellite videos of the worst typhoons of the past decade; in another, they produced an animated map of a single year’s typhoon season. The comments section is usually made up of weather enthusiasts contributing their own analyses, survivors remembering the terror of their experiences, or trolls making fun of the baffling editing choices, like the shitty music or weird transitions.

Even if we were able to prove beyond all doubt that climate change is causing more and worse typhoons, there is another problem, one that we’re already contending with: the capacity for words to capture a crisis that is planetary in scale. Hyperbole draws skepticism, maybe because excess in any form tires. You can only say Now, more than ever before so many times before people grow weary of a state of emergency. You can only call so many things super before it becomes a mere figure of speech. How then are we to speak of life in the face of an apocalypse?

~

I met you in Samar the year before everything changed. I missed my flight and when I landed hours after everyone else you tell me to get on a shuttle van; you’ll ride one back and we’ll meet halfway. I waited on the side of the road, surfboard leaning on backpack on top of duffel. A van pulled up, honking, kicking up a cloud of dust. Your crooked smile greeted me out of half-opened window. Get in.

The road stretches on, the miles add up, and an idea starts to settle in between us: in this sharpened point of time and space, we are together, headed in the same direction. It was our most treasured thing, this idea of freedom, this shared vista: a destination. It took us eight years to realise that we were only good in moving vehicles.

On the night that Yolanda arrived, I finally did it. As the great wind took everything, I walked away. Eyes dry, back straight, I dared not look back to see that old idea floating away, turning back into air.

~

So, is this a beginning, or an end?

I would have liked to ask Yolanda for an answer, but come morning, all that was left of the super typhoon, the worst storm to make landfall in world history, were scattered showers and blue skies.

~

Why does the wind sound like the rain?

Why does the rain sound like the sea?

All sea is sea. Or so it is written in honor of Aristagoras, an ancient Greek who led and lost a rebellion on the Aegean Sea, from which comes the word archipelago: named not for the Greek islands per se, but for the sea that surrounds them. The chief sea. The center is not empty; it is made of water.

The Philippine islands are shaped by the rain. The world knows of us because of our monsoons. In truth, the word monsoon speaks not of the rain, but of the wind: that which brings the rain, and with it the change in our daily habits of body and mind, the making and breaking of our plans for the future. The sprouting of seeds and the threshing of grains. The switching of the monsoons from Amihan to Habagat, and then the long summer lull before the winds change direction.

The monsoons stir up the seas, too, and thus they have influenced our own movements from island to island throughout time: sometimes to trade; sometimes to raid; sometimes to send money home; or start again—each of these looks very different, depending on the era.

And so it could be said that the seas give birth to the wind as a way for the world to begin, and to end.

~

Long, long ago, before the giant landmass of Pangaea broke up into the continents and islands we recognize today, ancient Earth was covered in a single ocean. Panthalassa. The ocean, the land, the Earth, all as one. Things were simpler, then.

Water is in a constant state of transformation, flowing through time and space. It makes its own kind of circle, and as it does, it moves us through each of its states. Whether fast or slow, falling or rising, water is always returning.

I’ve known it since my mother brought me, one summer at the beach, to the edge of the continental shelf, where the coral reef dropped down into darkness. She held my hand so I could swim the tiniest of circles, there at the point where the ocean begins, as in, starts to become unfathomable.

What have you always known? This question isn’t for you. It’s for me.

The sea is my way home.

~ ⧜ ∞ ⧝ ∞ ⧜ ~

*Joar Songcuya - Rain at the Caribbean (2020), Oil on canvas, 92 cm x 122 cm*
Image description: The painting depicts a foggy seascape. In the foreground are blue waves rendered in gentle, winding strokes. In the center of the painting, the tips of a whale’s tail and two fins peek out from the sea surface. In the background, the sky is in light shades of white, green, and purple.

Endnotes

[1] Jonah 2:6, The Bible, New International Version.
[2] Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basics, A Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (September 2013).

Born in Hong Kong, Nicola Sebastian is a Filipino writer, surfer, and National Geographic Explorer. She is interested in “islandness,” both as space and sensibility. Her work has been published in Orion Magazine, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Bellingham Review, VICE Asia, and CNN Philippines. Nicola graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University, New York, where she was the Managing Editor of the Columbia Journal, and taught fiction writing to undergraduates. She lives in La Union, Philippines, where she cofounded Emerging Islands, an arts-for-ecology collective that produces island stories. "Horizon I: Origin Story" is an excerpt from her memoir-in-progress on disaster, discovery, and the Philippines.

*

Joar Songcuya is a self-taught Filipino painter, engineer and seafarer. He sailed the world for almost a decade as a marine engineer onboard commercial ships and has traveled to over 50 countries and 86 international shipping ports and terminals worldwide, and has done solo. painting exhibitions in Manila around his life at sea – “The History of Water” ( 2021), “Atlantiko, Pasipiko, Artiko” (2021) and “The Sea is Not a Quiet Place” (2022).

Joar’s ongoing research “The Seamanship Project” is supported by the NoExitGrant from Para Site Hongkong exploring intersecting issues of seafaring and marine engineering, migration and labor, masculinity, and human ecology within his memories of the ocean and his origin, the Philippines – a maritime country.

Horizon I: An Origin Story

By Nicola Sebastian

Endnotes

About
Singapore Unbound

Horizon I: An Origin Story

By Nicola Sebastian

Endnotes

About Singapore Unbound

About
Singapore Unbound