Shall We Become Ocean?

What is the ocean? What is the sound of the depths? Shall we “become” the ocean?

These are the questions John Luther Adams calls forth in his compelling orchestral piece, “Become Ocean”. The listener quickly realizes that the floodgates of melody and harmony have been breached, and water flows through them as it pleases–sometimes as a gentle current as naturally as air fills the lungs, and other times as a violent swell, a tsunami of sound which bursts forth and soon dissipates. Adams cites the sounds and sensations of nature as the primary inspiration for his work. In kind, I recall my many adventures in the great national parks and natural areas of my country, where nature indeed sings music of its own, in the brooks and the birds and the billowing winds and waves. It is this music which Adams has dedicated his career to recreate.

The thesis of human music is argued through the creative imposition of order upon a chaotic sea of sound, to tell great narratives and organize the human experience. Adams’ composition, in postmodern fashion, represents the antithesis, abandoning all musical structure–unwittingly, perhaps, recalling a time when “the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep…”. Indeed, the undoing of orderly creation is the watery void, where there is no distinction or separation. We do well to recognize Adams’ remarkable achievement in co-opting the Western orchestra, a pinnacle of creative structure and harmony, into the cry of an alien past, with the characteristic sound of each instrument dissolved into a sonic morass. 

In describing the experience of the listener, myriad aquatic metaphors present themselves. One is “swept up” and “carried away” by the music; one is “immersed” in a “sea of sound”, “unanchored” from normal awareness to enter a “flow state” wherein the music “washes over” the imagination. “Become Ocean” moves its listeners to utter wonder. It gives the listener gills, but not fins, casting us to and fro in the depths without the means to influence our course, enrapturing us in an aural abyss lacking rhyme or reason. The book of Genesis declares of humanity: “Dust you are, and to dust you shall return.” This piece reverberates with the murmurs of the dust that went before us, and will continue long after we have returned to it.

What shall we say, then, to Adams’ questions? 

Can we truly unmoor ourselves in the endless deep through music, apprehending its primal echoes in a time unshackled by order and discretization, a time before time itself? As much as Adams may succeed in evoking the sensation, the medium itself rebukes him. Without the slightest perturbation, the conductor’s wand moves back and forth, steady as a clock’s pendulum; just as chronological time reigns with predictable, periodic motion, so too must musical time. The conductor orders the players’ steps, though Adams would have you imagine there is nothing solid in his piece to walk on. No performer is without sheet music, neatly arrayed in a melodic prose that does not wander aimlessly, but proceeds without interruption to its inevitable terminus. The music must end; the ocean cannot, roiling and beating and swelling onwards into infinity.

Can we understand what the depths truly are? Without ultimate structure, Adams’ piece lacks the agent who speaks to the ocean its purpose, the One above all the chaos: “…and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters”. The oceans do not exist, in the end, to crash about with primordial potential, as Adams might have us imagine in his piece that ebbs without resolution. The oceans exist to be separated, to be rent forth and in their rending reveal the glory of their Creator. In pulling back the seas and saying “No further”, this Creator makes way for the cosmic mountain atop which His image-bearers are to reside. Who but He can comprehend and order the chaos? Who but He can restrain Leviathan, the archetypal monster of the deep? The same questions once fielded to a stupefied Job will no more relent today to our modern frameworks of thought. 

Shall we “become” the ocean, in its endless, churning, chaos? We humans are creatures of separation: first from the darkness, then from the ocean, then from the plants, then from the lower animals, and lastly from the earth, when the breath of God gives Spirit to physical form. In separating the chaotic waters so far from humans, God sets them in utter contrast to our purpose of being mediators between heaven and earth. Genesis claims we are to be the high priests of the Edenic temple, to co-rule with God from the cosmic mountain. The rest of the Bible points toward the Messiah who fulfilled this calling where the rest of us could not. This Messiah, the God-Man, displayed supreme dominion over the great seas, striding across them where all others would drown and rebuking them to stillness where all others would be thrashed. Just as He called Peter out of the boat to conquer the watery chaos, so He does all of us, and promises ultimate victory if we trust Him. In this baptism of body and spirit, for a time we are buried under the waves, but we always emerge with resurrection life in hand. To “become” the ocean, then, is to refuse the teleology of our nature. To become the ocean is to reject our very being, and even to reject the Ground of being Himself. 

After all, there is no ground in the ocean.