Georgia, Chapter VI — The Sea, Wasted Time, and the Right to Produce Nothing Before Infinity
Behind the dog was the sea.
Not the one in the brochures.
The real one.
Cold, wide, indifferent, and full of people doing nothing particularly useful.
After a month in Batumi, I had come to understand that the sea had at least two lives.
In the first, it was a view.
Ocean view.
Two words capable of raising an apartment’s price without adding a single inch to the water.
The sea became an amenity included in the contract, like Wi-Fi, the rooftop pool, and the promise that the neighbor would not rent his place to eight drunk young men for the weekend.
In its second life, however, the sea was a place.
You walked there.
You sat down.
You stayed.
You did not have to own it to look at it.
You did not have to order anything.
There was no waiter assigned to ask whether you wanted something else at the precise moment you had finally achieved an acceptable form of silence.
Batumi’s beach made little effort to seduce you.
No soft sand.
Pebbles.
Millions of polished stones, beautiful to photograph and designed with obvious hostility toward the human spine.
You sat down to contemplate the horizon and after seven minutes began losing feeling in one leg.
It was a very concrete form of spirituality.
The body kept the soul from becoming conceited.
And still people came.
They settled on the stones, the low walls, the concrete platforms, along the rocks.
A woman sat alone before the water.
A young man in headphones occupied his own rectangle of the world while, much farther away, another figure did the same.
Three people formed a small group near the shore.
Two young women talked while sitting on a graffiti-covered wall.
Others walked without appearing to have anywhere they needed to arrive.
The sea distributed the distances.
Everyone could choose how close to be to others without filing a declaration about their emotional condition.
In the city, being alone looks suspicious.
If you eat alone, someone assumes you have been left.
If you go to the movies alone, you look like a man whose friends have stopped answering.
If you sit on a bench without looking at your phone, after ten minutes you might be mistaken for a philosopher, a homeless person, or someone planning a crime with disturbing calm.
Before the sea, however, solitude requires no explanation.
Looking at the water is already a socially acceptable activity.
It does not matter whether you are thinking about love, money, your mother, a bad decision, or absolutely fucking nothing.
From the outside, the gesture looks the same.
You are a figure before the horizon.
The photograph absolves you.
Being alone and feeling alone are not always the same thing.
One is a room you enter voluntarily.
The other is a door locked from the outside.
The images did not tell me which one lived inside those people.
I could see the distance.
Not the reason.
It was important to remember that.
A man alone before the sea is not automatically sad.
He may finally be at peace.
He may have left at home a family he loves deeply and whose noise he has been unable to stand for approximately forty-five minutes.
He may be listening to music.
He may be waiting for someone.
He may no longer be waiting for anyone, which during certain periods of life is a considerable achievement.
The sea offered one of the last gentle forms of anonymity.
You could be alone without being isolated.
Bodies remained around you.
A family on a platform.
Women with children.
A dog stretched out on the pebbles with the serenity of one who has never heard of proper posture.
People talking.
Others sharing only the direction of their gaze.
There was no need to know one another.
Being in the same place was enough.
It is a function of public spaces we have nearly forgotten.
Allowing strangers to exist together without having to become customers, friends, followers, professional contacts, or potential people to fuck.
In a shopping mall, you are a consumer.
In a restaurant, you are a cover charge.
In a hotel, you are a reservation.
Before the sea, you became a body with time again.
An economically disappointing category.
Perhaps that is why we keep trying to correct it.
We outfit the waterfront.
Build bars.
Organize experiences.
Sell lounge chairs, cocktails, excursions, photographs, apartments, and lessons on how to breathe correctly before something that has been breathing for a few billion years without ever buying a course.
We cannot bear the idea that a person might occupy space without producing value.
Not even for half an hour.
We have turned rest into functional recovery.
You do not rest because you are alive.
You rest to become more efficient again.
You walk to reach ten thousand steps.
You meditate to improve concentration.
You go on vacation to recharge, an expression that describes us as household appliances with annual leave and childhood problems.
Even wasting time has to prove itself useful for something.
Those people, however, were simply there.
At least in the photographs.
They were not producing.
They were not improving themselves.
They were not turning the horizon into motivational content.
They looked.
They talked.
They walked.
One man entered the water while behind him appeared the port, the cranes, and mountains still marked by snow.
He was nearly naked before a landscape containing the city’s entire economy.
Ships.
Industry.
Tourism.
Construction.
In the middle of it all, he possessed only a body and the questionable conviction that this was a good day to get it wet.
It seemed to me a minimal form of freedom.
Not the kind announced on posters.
The kind that consists of doing something with no return simply because you feel like it.
Farther on, someone had planted a large metal cross among the pebbles.
Before the horizon, we had felt the need to add a vertical line.
It is very human.
The sea does not answer, so we build something that promises to answer in its place.
I did not know who prayed there, whether anyone truly prayed, or whether the cross had by then become only another object crossed by the wind.
But it too occupied the beach without buying anything.
A little farther away stood an empty lifeguard tower.
Red.
Raised above the stones.
No lifeguard.
No summer to watch over.
Then a broken pier, reduced to a row of pillars entering the water and ending too soon.
Human beings built structures to dominate the edge.
The sea kept passing through the legs of the project.
It did not win.
It did not lose.
It did not join the discussion.
It reached the pebbles.
Withdrew.
Repeated.
The oldest unproductive activity on the planet.
Near the skyscrapers, someone had stacked stones.
One on top of another.
It was Batumi’s most honest real estate development.
No rendering.
No penthouse.
No promise of returns.
Only a temporary balance destined to be knocked over by a hand, the wind, or the first sufficiently motivated wave.
Perhaps a child had made it.
Perhaps an adult busy reconnecting with his inner child after paying someone to explain how.
It did not matter.
It had left a mark that did not expect to last.
In a city obsessed with building, that small stack calmly accepted the possibility of disappearing.
I photographed it.
Of course.
We photographers have a complicated relationship with things that disappear.
We say we want to save them.
In truth, we often only want to be present when it happens so we can prove later that time destroyed something under our supervision.
I flew the drone too.
From above, the beach became a pale strip between the city and the water.
The people nearly disappeared.
Dots remained.
Scattered.
Ordered by distance.
It was the same beach, but not the same place.
From above, you saw the territory.
From the ground, you felt the stones under your ass.
Every urban development should be debated from both positions.
The first shows how much space exists.
The second reminds us that this space touches someone.
I remained on the ground.
The light changed slowly.
The sea shifted from blue to gray, then held a strip of light while a few figures continued walking along the shore.
No revelation.
No promise.
A bench faced the water.
A man was sitting.
Another stood not far away.
They were doing nothing worthy of a headline.
And that was precisely the point.
A city is not truly public when it allows everyone to pass through.
It is public when it lets someone stop without explaining why, without being driven away, and without having to buy the right to remain.
The sea was not a view.
It was Batumi’s largest room.
It had no walls.
It had no credible owner.
And for a few hours, it welcomed anyone with time to waste.
Then the city began lighting up behind me.
The sea grew dark without needing a sign.
Batumi did the opposite.
The night, I would discover, had a far more aggressive sales department.