June 18, 2007
The Abyssal, Revisited
Humpback anglerfish (Melanocetus johnsonii).
Any more thoughts on the questions I posed? Still curious to hear your thoughts, especially on recent sightings of the squid or octopus meme.
In the meantime, a postscript to my last post:
Kristeva gave us the Abject. Baudrillard gave us the Simulacrum. Freud gave us the Uncanny, among other unforgettable theorizations, and Kant, Burke, and company group-hacked the open-source idea of the Sublime. The Abyssal, a philosophical subspecies of the Sublime, cries out for theorization, here and now.
The Abyssal appears, in the mass imagination, as shorthand for the stygian, the cthonic---a lightless realm of bioluminescent nightmares, a Dalinian dreamworld populated by bathypelagic monsters unlike anything on land. Speaking of whom, Dali famously used the Abyssal as a metaphor for our collective dream life, delivering a lecture in a bell-helmeted deep-sea diving suit, the better to descend into subconcious (he nearly asphyxiated in mid-lecture) .
As Mikita Brottman implies, the Abyssal is its own binary, appearing in Jacques Cousteau and David Attenborough nature documentaries as a hallucinogenic fantasia on one hand, all rainbow-hued tropical fish and Day-Glo coral reefs and kelp forests, gently rocked by the waves, and on the other as an inky-black underworld populated by grotesque creatures, some of them blind, albino monstrosities. (In this context, James Cameron's bathetic Abyss represents a mythopoeic attempt to reconcile visions of the undersea kingdom as celestial and cthonic.)
The abyss often figures, in the pop unconscious, as the dark doppelganger to space exploration: the race to the stars, reversed. And what about the aquarium, which domesticates the deep-sea sublime, offering a porthole on the Mariana trench for armchair Captian Nemos? When did bourgeois aquarium owners start putting divers, treasure chests, and the crumbling ruins of Atlantis in their aquariums? And what do they mean?
Random thought: Is our persistent vision of the Deep as a darkworld populated by monsters, a counterweight to the Jungian vision of the sea as nurturing memory of intrauterine bliss, an evolutionary hangover---a dim but troubling recollection of prehistoric horrors (see Chased By Sea Monsters by Nigel Marven)?
Or does the Abyssal represent the last terrestrial frontier, the rainbow's stubborn refusal to be unwoven by human knowledge? As the noted postmodern philosopher Donald Rumsfeld reminds us, there are known knowns and known unknowns and unknown unknowns---things we don't even know we don't know---into which last category must fall the undiscovered denizens of the deep. Is it the business of the Abyssal to be the inexhaustible account from which we withdraw our wonder and horror, the last great repository of awe in a world descralized by science, cynicism, and the media? If so, then embodied myths like Architeuthis and living fossils like the coelacanth are totemic animals, giving shape to the notion that monsters may still lurk in the far corners of Google Maps, that time travel may exist, that the dead may rise again, that science has not killed magic and mystery dead.
Posted by Mark Dery at 02:10 PM
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June 15, 2007
The Abyssal
Battle of the Titans: Giant squid (Architeuthis dux) and Sperm Whale locked in mortal combat in the vasty deep...of the American Museum of Natural History's Hall of Ocean Life.
When Clive Thompson ran an item on his brain-fryingly great blog, Collision Detection, about a colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) that fishermen hauled in off the coast of New Zealand---a 990-pound, 39-foot leviathan that is half as big again as the next largest specimen ever caught---one commenter wondered, "My question is: 'Why do we find so many NOW?! I mean, [these] things existed for thousands of years, it is CENTURIES [since we began] fishing in those seas and then BAM! We start fishing them up like sardines...Isn't it weird?'"
As Tom Wolfe would say, "But...exactly!"
Of the 15 known specimens listed on Wikipedia, nine have been reported since 1979. A National Geographic.com story about the saucer-eyed colossus mentioned one explanation: Fishing boats are venturing, increasingly, into Antarctic waters, where Mesonychoteuthis is known to feed on Patagonian toothfish. Whatever the reason, close encounters with monsters of the deep seem to be on the rise, and the creatures in question seem to be getting bigger and weirder with each encounter. Time was when giant squid were the stuff of Peter Benchley beach novels, sufficient to clear the water at the Kennedy compound for weeks. When Japanese researchers filmed a giant squid in 2006, squid geeks were agog, and a video clip of the thrashing monster seemed to be everywhere, online.
But the giant squid is comic relief compared to Mesonychoteuthis, which with its razor-sharp beak and tentacles bristling with nasty-looking hooks (the better to hang onto its prey), is "not just larger but an order of magnitude meaner" than the mere giant squid, as New Zealand teuthologist Steve O'Shea told the BBC when a specimen was recovered in 2003. Kat Bolstad, a research associate at the Auckland University of Technology, put it bluntly: "This animal...is...something you are not going to want to meet in the water."
Where will it end?With the grotesque megasquid brought to CGI life in the Animal Planet series "The Future is Wild," which projected Darwinian evolution 200 million years into a posthuman future, where mammals, birds, and reptiles are extinct, but air-breathing, elephant-sized Megasquid roam the forests and tiny Squibbons (gibbon-like squid) scuttle through the trees? The series hints that Squibbons, being highly intelligent, may evolve into sentient beings, usurping the evolutionary throne from the humans who once dominated the planet. In other words, the calamari shall inherit the earth.
Deep in our imaginative consciousness, there may already be an, er, inkling that our days as top-predator are numbered. The squid meme is proliferating throughout alt.culture. At least one blog, Squid, trolls pop culture for squid sightings and has hauled up examples of squid imagery on neckties, cummerbunds, fine art, stuffed toys, and especially T-shirts. And what are we to make of the fact that the audience for tentacle hentai , a once-obscure species of Japanese cartoon porn involving wide-eyed nymphettes ravaged by giant squid, has mushroomed online, if the explosion of websites is any gauge?
One T-shirt vendor has the answer to all of these questions: "The cephalopod biomass is now greater than the human biomass. We don't know how many there are or how big they get. We are NOT ready. Play it smart." Playing it smart, in this case, means buying a T-shirt emblazoned with the words "Welcome Squid Overlords" and a cartoon image of a giant squid. Or is it colossal?
Here's where you come in: I'm writing an essay for Discover magazine on this subject, equal parts hard science and cultural criticism. (The assignment won me an audience with the American Museum of Natural History's resident specimen of a giant squid, whose pickled tentacle I got to fondle, still dripping from the alcohol bath in which the leviathan reposed. Groping a kraken! How cool is that?) I'd love to hear your thoughts, here in the comment thread, on:
Why the image of the Battle of the Titans (giant squid versus Sperm whale) haunts the mass mind.
Whether you think the squid, giant or mere calamari fritti, is emerging as the totemic animal of the Screen Age, its morphology---all brain, hands, and saucer eyes---a metaphor for our increasing reduction to brains with eyes, in Matrix culture.
Any sightings of the squid meme you've come across.
And what's up with this tentacle porn thing?Why we're so obsessed with giant squid.
(Naturally, if I quote you, I'll contact you for proper attribution---i.e., how you'd like to be ID'd---so be sure to leave your e-dress if you comment.)
Posted by Mark Dery at 12:17 PM
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