I. The sealophone
A kind of tiny time machine
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✦ Part I. of a rippling triptych: on remember-things, enchantment and disillusionment. On connection, humanity and our shared memory, and the (in)accessibility of what we seek, yet sometimes (just not) manage to find.
The sealophone
A kind of tiny time machine
I am standing in the living room at my grandparents’ house. To my right is the window, looking out onto the garden: birds, the rain gauge, the shed, and in the doorway, the swing. In front of me stands the aquarium: a magical, luminous glass tank, filled with water plants and brightly coloured fish, gravel lining the bottom. I am still small, and the tank seems enormous. It feels like yet another window, a glimpse, an entrance almost, into the world of fish. A liquid portal.
In my small hand I hold a large, cold, brown shell with pale spots. I press it gently against my ear and hear the murmur. ‘The sound of the sea,’ my grandfather says.
I don’t remember whether I truly believed it, that the murmur really was the sound of the sea. What I do remember very clearly, is the connection I felt: between the shell, the sound in my ear, and the sea. And the aquarium — though filled with fresh water — belonged to that same magical world.
This memory takes place in the ‘80s. I was familiar with the concept of calling someone; my first telephone experience was with a rotary dial. We played with walkie-talkies. Once, we crafted our own makeshift phone connection: two tin cans with a string stretched between them.
And the shell — not just this one, but all large shells — carried messages from the sea. Incomprehensible, in another language. A sealophone, why not? At that time, it just rang true.
Magic, born from the inexplicable, is often undone by the gathering of more knowledge. I sometimes wish myself back to moments when I, as a child, did not yet understand something and simply accepted that. Or tried to explain it, patching together my limited understanding with my own imagination. Without questioning: Does this even make sense?
My parents’ standard response to questions about topics that were too complicated or ‘too grown-up’ was: ‘I’ll explain it to you another time.’ It made me furious: what use was that to me now? If only I had written all those questions down, by now I can’t remember any of them. And chances are I’ve found the answers to most of them myself in the meantime. And somehow, as frustrating as it was to my younger self, my parents were right. Some things are best discovered, figured out, and experienced on your own.
It is often adults who reason away old ideas, born in our childhood dream factory, with logic, facts, knowledge, and science. And sometimes, in more painful cases, we become the adult who says (even to ourselves): ‘You really can’t believe this any longer. You shouldn’t. It’s not right.’
The acoustic explanation for that rushing, whispering sound inside a shell has been around for a long time. And yet… For centuries, perhaps even since the beginning of humanity (and shellfish), people have been passing down the same myth.
Shell, sea creature, sea, ear, the rushing sound of the surf: in my mind, they were already linked. My grandfather’s words, in that setting, worked like a spell: they drew all the individual elements even closer together. Like a sweet-salty collage, they formed an auditory illusion. And I didn’t need to be convinced. It simply felt right.
Science and knowledge broke the spell and the illusion, but not the deep interconnectedness of the individual elements. And the realization that my memory is really part of our shared experience adds a new layer of meaningful connection. A shared, almost universal experience. A kind of semi-collective memory.
The search for an explanation — from wonder to misconception — is beautifully documented. With the advent of carefully digitized archives, it’s possible to travel centuries back online. A vast array of human creations: scientific, narrative, poetic, and visual. All about the same phenomenon. It makes me feel even more deeply connected to that aspect of being human: the constant desire to understand everything, even when the knowledge isn’t (quite) there yet.
For me, the act of holding a large shell to my ear never became just a simple gesture. It’s a memory catalyst, evoking a beautiful recollection: of my grandparents, their house, my childhood, warmth, and belonging. Maybe not a spell, but still an almost magical act. It turns the shell into a kind of tiny time machine.
I would love to ask everyone about their first sea-shell-murmur-experience
In all honesty: I still hold every large shell I come across to my ear for a brief moment.
⁂
✶ Series:
Shellter – On sheltering, shell murmur, and the body as a temporary home.
✶ This story unfolds as a shell-serial in three parts:
I. The sealophone - A kind of tiny time machine
II. De shell - Where might it be now?
III. The source - 20.000 leagues under copyright
✦ Image 1. is from Wikimedia Commons: an open, digital media archive that collects and shares millions of royalty-free photos, illustrations, and historical documents, contributed by museums, archives, and volunteers worldwide.
✦ Image 2. is from The Public Domain Review’s Public Domain Image Archive: a carefully curated collection of historic, royalty-free images spanning over 2,000 years of visual culture.
✧ Originally written in Dutch by Merel Slootheer. Translated with care and intuition by Blackbird Ditchlord.
Full source references for this trilogy can be found under the afterword →
Everything here grows slowly,
with care, in my own rhythm.
𓆑 𓂃 ˖ ݁.