Restructuring Viewpoints: Soma, Darkness, and Depth
The Oldest Sensory Deprivation Chamber
Colin Matheson
Any casual look at the sea constitutes a venture into the unknown. An endlessly vast and mysterious body that has toppled both mountains and societies with unrelenting force. Underneath it waves lie the bodies and ships of uncountable sailors who tried to navigate its perilous surface. Yet with the same hand it gives, providing sustenance to coastal human settlements. This dichotomy is best illustrated by Walt Whitman in his poem “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” when he describes the sea as, “Some old crone rocking the cradle, swathed in sweet garments, bending aside,/ The sea whisper’d [to] me, [“Death”]”. Humanity’s relentless attempts to characterize the sea reinforce the notions of its mystery. The unknown the sea entails remain hidden because of its remoteness, technological shortcomings, and as Cousteau describes it, “a bondage to the surface”. Our bondage to the surface is more than our physiological capabilities as it also relates to the way in which we perceive the world we live in. Our senses shape how we understand the world, learning more from the senses that are stronger and marginalizing those that are not. This is evidenced in all aspects of human life with sight, typically our strongest sense, being the main way that we convey information. Most necessary information is conveyed through sight in the form of signs and pages. Even our terminology “the way one sees the world” or “how one views a situation” highlight our reliance on the sense of sight. While this sense is adapted perfectly for living on land with a constant source of light this becomes a problem thousands of fathoms below the waves. The way we perceive the world around us is rendered obsolete forcing us to find other methods to understand the unique world of the sea.
What is most compelling in Carson’s approach to describing the sea is how she illuminates the unobserved scenes of the depths. With words she casts a light on the brilliance and unknown, bringing to life the creatures as if they were swimming before us. The catastrophic waves that batter continents and the storm that rattle overhead are breathtaking in her descriptions. Yet her greatest account is highlighted by its subtly. In “The Sunless Sea” Carson chronicles the descent of light rays through the ocean depths. The waves of light are stratified and halted at particular points until darkness reigns. The segmented fading of lights divides the ocean into zones of color, each with animals that mirror their surroundings. The brilliant blue of the mackerel defines the zone it inhabits, but not so peculiarly as the creatures that reside where light does not penetrate. Here Carson describes the fish as similar to “blind men with canes” relying on touch to decipher the abyss that surrounds them. The way in which Carson illustrates and breaks up these zones of light is marvelous, using humanity’s strongest sense to illustrate the world of the deep. By circumventing the greatest differences between that world and ours Carson creates a narrative that could captivate audiences by showing the birth and development of the sea. I believe that is why this novel is one of the view environmental novels that is universally acclaimed, Carson illuminates a mysterious world near us better than authors conjure up imaginary lands.
My key takeaway from reading Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us is that there is a magnificent world in close proximity to us that is too often ignored. This submerged biome continues to be a mystery to humans and is less chartered than the moon. I believe Carson does this to illustrate the presence of a world that human too readily and unknowingly affect, in hopes of garnering more support for its discovery.
Similar, Yet Different
Madeleine Soss
In the summer of 2010, I went to summer camp—as many children do. The camp was approximately five minutes from my house, but my twelve-year-old self still felt hundreds of miles away from home. This camp had winding trails that crisscrossed an eight-hundred acre lot that danced and teased its way between the Carolinas. The camp horses, including my favorites Big Magnum and Blueberry, would spend their days frolicking along these trails and grazing on the grassy bald that was miles away.
At camp, I spent my days swimming and kayaking in the Green River. The cool and sophisticated high-school girls, however, spent their time trying to complete the hyper-competitive Icicle Falls challenge—and I wanted to join. Icicle Falls resided off the trail close to the stomping grounds of Big Magnum and Blueberry.
Icicle falls was not a significant sight, at least in the realm of waterfalls. There wasn’t much to behold in the not powerful, but steady, surge of water that poured off a medium sized boulder. A small but powerful stream meandered from beneath the falls and eventually joined Lake Summit. But all summer long, campers would make the hike to this miniature sight and try to bear the constant pounding of frigid spring-fed water upon their heads. Since the establishment of Camp Green Cove in 1945, the long-standing record of forty-five minutes set in the sixties had just been broken. The cool high school girls had pushed it to an hour.
I badly yearned to be cool like them. Maybe if I had broken that record they would have included me in their group. I’ll never know. All I remember about the rest of that summer was spending my free time sitting under the freezing water until my back was raw and my lips were blue. My skinny pre-teen body couldn’t handle the sustained chilly temperature and after forty minutes a counselor would inevitably yank me out of the falls, forcing me to start again…
I didn’t return to Green Cove for seven years, until I came back as a counselor. The whole experience was whittled with nostalgia (Big Magnum had passed away), and I found camp to represent a living relic of my clouded memories. The dangerous activities, such as the Icicle Falls challenge, had been strategically forgotten for liability’s sake.
One misty night, my fellow counselor planned a secret night hike for the girls. I came as supervising support. Seven little girls and I took off down the familiar horse trails, but it was dark. No flashlights were allowed on this surprise hike.
We tripped and tumbled our way silently down the trail. There was darkness, moistness, and the buzzing but calm voice of the forest that seemed to breathe with us. Mourning doves eerily cooed from above and the air became saturated with fear. I didn’t know where we were headed. The blackness grew blacker. It consumed us and hurt the eyes that I had come so dependent on. These little girls and I stumbled until my feet felt the comfortable cascading side trail, and I instinctually turned. The distant sound of trickling water grew into an overwhelming roar and it stole the sound of my own breath away from me.
Around the bend, the darkness was pierced by a hazy glow. Twinkling, blue incandescence lit up Icicle Falls. In the blackness of a new moon, there was light upon the roaring waters. Silhouettes of little girl’s faces revealed utter fascination and one by one, I stood in the icy stream and helped them across, so they could stare at the white-blue beacons that clung to the rock.
And standing in that raw water that threatened to sweep us away into the calm chaos of the forest, those little girls and I were one entity. We had one breath, one fear, one wonder.
My twelve-year-old self was also there in that stream. She had spent hours feeling that water, poking at salamanders, avoiding snakes, examining that rhododendron, and sliding her hand over that silky algae. But she never saw that.
Those silent seven-year-olds and I made our way up the steep slope and returned in darkness and peaceful silence. Similar, yet different. The roar of Icicle Falls faded. Similar, yet different.
The Waves of Humility
Cristin Berardo
Throughout Rachel Carson’s book, The Sea Around Us, Carson effectively invites readers to expand their understanding of the ocean’s vastness, age, and dynamism. In order to accomplish such a feat, she emphasizes the vitality and power of the ocean by giving it the protagonist’s role in her narrative while simultaneously diminishing humanity’s understanding and authority. The second part of this approach made an impression on me when I initially read her work, as it reminded me of how limited our knowledge about the earth, especially its oceans, really is.
One of her tactics in trivializing our long-held, anthropocentric belief in superior human wisdom is to remind us that human understanding of the natural world has been riddled with inaccuracies throughout its history. People once believed that the Sargasso, a part of the ocean covered with literal tons of sargassum algae, was a dangerous “[field] of weeds waiting to entrap a vessel” (27). This dark picture of the Sargasso “never existed except in the imaginations of sailors,” a description which evokes the imperfection of man. After a long and beautifully wrought passage about bioluminescence, Carson illuminates humanity’s inability to “read the language of the sea,” a want which causes us to attribute oceanic lights to human sources. Carson describes “lights that flash and fade away, lights that come and go for reasons meaningless to man, lights that have been doing this very thing over the eons of time in which there were no men to stir in vague disquiet” (34). This startling reminder of our own limitations aims to temporarily suspend the anthropocentric lens through which see the world, allowing us to grasp a wider view. Another fascinating aspect of these myths is the idea that, at one time, they were accepted as truth. How can we be so sure that our current “facts” aren’t just myths waiting to be analyzed and ridiculed by future generations?
Only in the later years of human history, with the rise of science and technology, have humans gained a more accurate picture of the water’s intricate functioning. However, Carson again humbles us, arguing that, even with our current, incredible advancements, much of the ocean’s mysteries remain beyond our reach. The ocean’s immense depths have remained largely obscure and unexplored by humans. With the invention of a steel instrument called a benthoscope, a few people have been able to descend deeper into the water than ever before, one man reaching 35,800 feet (39). However, these few ventures to the depths of the ocean have done little to further our understanding of the organisms that reside there. For example, a cloudy layer found hundreds of fathoms deep and covering much of the ocean is still stumping scientists. Another perplexing aspect of the ocean is its organisms, especially those that can navigate between the deep and shallow seas. A whale’s ability to dive to a depth of half a mile, where is experiences “a half a ton on every inch of body,” remains a conundrum to us land mammals (47). The fact that we still do not entirely understand the very waters that surround and sustain us, elucidates our tendency to overlook the grandeur of the ocean in the face of human ingenuity, a mistake which Carson attempts to expose and correct.
Carson’s portrayal of the ocean bids us to question why we, as a land-dwelling and extremely young species, believe we have the knowledge, ability, and right to control such an ancient and complex ecosystem as the ocean. It also encourages us to view this vast and timeless entity with respect and humility.
Sub-Blind
Elio Casinelli
I consider nature to be an experience, rather than a site of experience. Being immersed in an environment that is undisturbed by paved streets, high fences, or the cacophony of city life is as much an action as anything else. It appears time is suspended in these states, seemingly only denoted by the ability to see one’s breath and the amount of leaves on the trees. Through this state I was open to experiencing nature in a sort of senseless way that I have only truly grown to appreciate as my work days have grown longer and my time for natural interaction has diminished. In high school, our senior class went on a retreat to the Marin Headlands, a large series of rolling hills dotted with former military barracks used to house its patrons, to form a sense of camaraderie before we were to go our separate ways in college. The final night we were blindfolded, faced with the task of inching around crumbling buildings to instill an appreciation of teamwork in difficult circumstances. What we didn’t know was the sublime: the awesome and terrifying experience behind our blindness.
To recreate my experience in words is not only important to capture the experience I had at the time, but also to explicate how the experience has altered my notion of nature in the present day. On the night that we were to engage in this nature walk, we were all sat around a fire talking to our respective high school cliques, incredibly stereotypical upon reflection if I’m being honest. Approaching us from their respective barracks were teachers who came to run our retreat, and told us that we were all going to need to get shirts, blindfold ourselves, and return to the campfire. Perplexed, we slowly sauntered to our bunkbeds, grabbed whatever half dirty t-shirt from our too-small duffle bags, and stumbled back to the fire one by one. As we were given a speech about the value of teamwork and the importance of togetherness, all I could think about was how much it didn’t make sense to me. My hardheadedness solidified in my mind the importance of the self, the ‘me against the world’ mentality that adolescence brings in testosterone surrounded teenage boys. What I would come to experience though, the inability to conquer obstacles without others, has shifted my outlook.
Our only task was to find a flag in the ground. It seemed easy enough to us at the time, and the promise of free dress compensation had us divided into teams searching for our ticket to freedom. In the pitch black, we scampered around, bumping into each other as though we were obstacles, rather than instruments of each other’s mutual success. After and hour of futile searching and rising tension, we all decided that we would link together and walk along every inch of the space that we needed to cover rather than individually look. An additional 15 minutes of climbing over previously unreachable obstacles granted us the success that rugged individualism could not achieve. When we removed our blindfolds, we found that we were mere feet away from ledges that plunged more than fifty feet to the next closest landing.
Although in that moment of unmasking I felt instantly afraid, it has taken years of maturation to understand the actual implications of nature. Even though we were blinded in terms of sight, we were so confident in our connection that we could only truly see together. Nature was the experience that forged this sight: the incredible height was both awe-inspiring, and terrifying. It was incredible that we could tackle nature in a small way, but the unmatchable power of nature to remind us of our own mortality. The impending doom yet awesome beauty of nature has allowed me to delve into the experience of nature. Rather than considering it to be a place where activity ensues, I consider silent contemplation that flows in a natural landscape that piques curiosity and directs focus to be nature’s action.