By the Sea

My first sight of the ocean was of a desolate stretch of coastline in Southern Mexico, just north of the Cancun costa del date rape. Where the tourists hadn't yet arrived in the early '90s, a stretch of beach towards a ferry port ran amid assorted wreckage. Where empty concrete lots, stained with the accumulated rust of a few hurricane seasons ran down to the beach.

On the beach lay the hulls of fishing boats. In retrospect, they were probably simple fishing boats or small ferries. But they seemed to me, as a small child without any experience of boats or the sea or the adult world in general, to be great ships. And here they were, laid out and tipped over, rusted, torn apart, encrusted in alien lifeforms, as if chewed apart by monsters, their skeletons laid out like a horror movie set.

And there was the smell, not only unique, but vast and pervasive, an unfamiliar range of metallic ions atop rotting marine life. There were of course similarities to the chilly lakes and streams of the Upper Midwest I was used to swimming and fishing at, but to compare the two was like porterhouse and hamburger, two things made of the same substance but one infinitely richer than the other.

Years later, I stumbled upon Kunstformen der Natur, published in 1901 by the German biologist, philosopher, and artist Ernst Haeckel, whose stony positivist outlook was counterbalanced by the wild flights of fancy of his drawings of sea creatures. In Haeckel's book, the natural world was cut apart, stylized, turned into elaborate spires and quincunxes, monstrosities of radial symmetry, creatures like nightmare genitalia. Animals that I recognize as animals, that have the evolutionary patterns of animals, that seem uncannily neither animal nor plant nor fungus, slippery and primal things.

Not long after, in college, I learned a term for such things-- abject-- those things that seem to evade our symbolic notions of what reality should look like. Things like a corpse, like a weeping sore. Things that seem to come from some deep and amorphous primal space. Lots of Lacanian psychoanalysts, thinking they were thinking, wrote about this in dense, allusive treatises, and lots of French feminists, with little basis and a lot of essentialism, somehow equated the abject and the feminine.

The depths of the sea somehow lurked at the background of everything, the formlessness that appeared in dreams, at the edges of everyday life.

I stepped into a pristine tropical cove, fringed with waving palm trees. Underneath, the rocks swarmed with a thousand olivine-black sea cucumbers.