I fall into her. I see the dark water. I know the monster below, or rather, I’ve no doubt made the untimely acquaintance of one of her sisters of equal terror and have the stories of many friends (and even foes) who’ve confided in me their encounters with the creature of vengeful sorrow, insecure and terrified of every inch of blackness that compress her great body with leagues of wet weight. For this creature, any move, even by the inch, swirl an infinite measure of compounding fright, each drop, a fathom dark as the last; and yet she has never seen a drop; only the heavy, oppressive mass of her blue-green-black –and above all, cold– surround. What does that do to the beast but make her wild with hate and rage? What other option would one have in lonely self preservation but these, as recourse to such a life? Could we men stand a single hour of this isolation and hard pressure against our will without praying to the dark gods below even us, at those depths, for death? And what do our oldest stories tell of the great sea’s monsters? Their kindness and gentleness? No, the stories of all seamen are that of survival, not victory, not love requited; rather, most often an extremity, given at once in protest and offering.
And if the translucent ones we see from time to time through that pink and foggy skin (as if some of the species were made as explication and forewarning by the gods for our benefit and devilishly, for our enlightened curiosity, despite the laughable need to dive at peril to such a depth as to observe the damned creature-this to say for the amusement of the gods as primary motivation) betray the fiery emotions that course through her veins as she devour men like me; without abandon, with joy; joy, herself thankful, for the death of another is, sure, a meal, but more, a celebration of survival after battle with that blinding dark and its demons formed of her own fearfullest imagination; with hate and rage themselves, then these are the that give her her scarce purpose, to show us Nature’s truth: As we battle, we become the things we battle, and perhaps the battle itself.
Those hot red chemicals in her are the animating vigor of life itself. If ever extracted they must be the secret to the universe. And where else to hide a grandest secret but in the hot veins of the coldest, fiercest dragon at the deepest, most terrifying, compressive and claustrophobic place imaginable to the curious mind of man? If his curiosity dare him such depths, well, then, perhaps he indeed deserve her, and with her, life itself. What is living for a man, but daring, begging of the dark her secrets, pledging a wound, and braving the depths of woman? And so, I fall into her.
Why draw these comparisons; woman and sea creature? Well, she is water, chaos, unknown creature, and tempest in one. She lives as subjective creature and as force of nature. She holds life in her possession, demands a deep and dangerous dive in exchange for knowing her, both sexually, as to make life, and intellectually, as to discover her personal mysteries. She wraps us up in tentacles and devours us. We must pledge everything. And she demands us because unlike men choosing to go at risk out of both curiosity and instinct, she is already at risk. She is nature. She is life and death in one. There is resentment in those waters for those who sail atop them without proper homage and sacrifice to the difficulty of life below. And to plunder the depths for our further benefit! That must not go without some exchange.