Before I begin – before we begin – I’m going to dig into the sand with both my hands, and then stand slowly up, with a miniature mountain cupped in front of me. And then I’m going to adjust my palms, ever so slightly, to release a slow, sandy trickle that will hourglass this flow of geophysical reflections, reversing time for a minute or two, or three, or four, as the grains fall like charms onto the beach.
Porthmeor Beach is a magical space, 110,000 square metres of fragmented carbonate material (that’s “sand” to you and me), bracketed like a pair of claws by ancient headlands of dolerite and gabbro: dark, intrusive rocks formed from slowly cooling magma some 300-400 million years ago.
On a map, the eastern headland (“The Island”) is an old man’s head, Smeaton’s Pier his straggly beard, his prominent nose dribbling into St Ives Bay, St Nicholas Chapel whispering in his ear. Much of the shoreline of St Ives Bay – in Cornish: Cammas an Tewyn: “the bay of the sand dunes” – is carpeted by the wave-fragmented shell casings of billions of long-dead marine creatures, broken up and driven ashore as particles of sand by the ceaseless Atlantic swells. Pick up a handful of Cornish sand and you commune with the ghosts of ten thousand lives lost at sea. Like the Sybil of Greek mythology, who was granted her terrifying wish of a year of life for every grain of sand she could hold in her hand, we too are gazing upon immortality.
Sand is mesmerising: both ordinary and enchanted, intimate and infinite, a marker of time – the three-minute egg: the five-minute essay – as well as of infinities of scale. The cosmologist Carl Sagan once claimed that there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on all of Earth’s beaches, a claim that was dismissed at the time as hyperbole, but which now appears, astonishingly, to be true. The thought recalls a childhood memory of writing my name and address on my school-bag: “Feock, Truro, Cornwall, England, Great Britain, Europe, The World, The Solar System, The Universe, The Cosmos”, but not knowing which one was supposed to go last: the universe or the cosmos? Which one was bigger? Which holds more grains of sand?
The question tricks me back into another memory-time, not my own but my mother’s: a vicar’s daughter from Penzance who, as a teenager, discovered that the 1960s had landed over the border in St Ives, hanging out at firelit beach-parties with suntanned art students doing summer work at the Hepworth studio, “chipping for Barbara”, as they called it, learning their trade from the leading light in postwar sculpture.
The thing that is always said about the St Ives artists is that they came here for the light –and as so many of the luminous landscapes on display in Tate St Ives attest, the vaulting skies of Cornwall are among the atmosphere’s greatest gifts. But I’ve long suspected that some of them really came here for the geology: for what lies beneath this ancient and enchanted landscape of stone, sand and sea; the very titles in the gallery that overlooks this beach drawing a poetic map of west Penwith: “St Ives”, “Porthleven”, “Trevalgan”, “Tol-Pedn”, “St Just”, “Mounts Bay”, “Porthmeor” or “Port Meor”, to borrow Alfred Wallis’s preferred construction.
And while visitors to Tate St Ives are asked to keep their hands to themselves, down here on “Port Meor” Beach the sand in my hands – in our hands – is all about touch, tickling slightly as it trickles away, over seconds, over minutes, over aeons. A billion or so years ago – a blink in the eye of my hand-held sand-timer – the moon was much nearer Earth than it is today, with a stronger gravitational pull raising vast tides in our planet’s young oceans. The energy dissipated by those tides as friction helped slow the earth’s rotation, locking our moon into its present alignment, so it always shows the same face to the earth. In the fullness of time, the earth, too, will become tidally locked, and so will always show the same face to the moon. The tides will cease, bringing to an end the great natural spectacle of an ocean dragged across the beach by the moon’s cosmic leash, with the entire weight and breath and heartbeat of the sea involved in the daily shaping and reshaping of the shoreline – a liminal space that is erased and rewritten twice a day by tidal improvisations: by what oceanographers know as “the Atlantic calcium carbonate budget”, or by what children and castle builders know as “fresh sand”, laid out anew each day.
And it’s waiting for us now, as my sandglass ebbs away to nothing: a miniature cosmos, our new world of sand, waiting to be created and erased again, by a hundred hands, by a single tide.
