deep black sea

One

There’s no linear way to slog through this.

There’s no single path connecting all the points, strung like pins on a global chart, wire tangled feverishly in between – no clear start, no obvious finish, only wire upon wire upon wire. Forget a chronological attempt – the past folds and refolds, waves churning against the shore, over and over in one planetary ocean of experience. Above that deep black sea I stand, unable from this narrow deck to sense the outlines of distant shores, the floor’s terrain beneath the liquid mass, as the ship presses through the fog, skimming the surface of a great, dark, isolating void. I have known that void; I have fallen asleep to whalesong, lonesome calls pining across the emptiness, and I have found myself lifeless, swaying in the cold current on one small patch of grassy grit beneath a heedless sea. I have known five fish below a nowhere reef in Cozumel, fins steadying them in the undulating waves, eyes vacant, disinterested – nothing to do but fan their fins, work their gills while the minutes and hours and days and weeks and months roll in, one after another, until experience itself dissolves into a steady drone, rendering minds mindless.

The ocean hisses: the collective whispered roar of a thousand thousand particles grating each other, compounding against the ear like a subconscious neural buzz. I have heard that hiss in the whirr of frogs on a summer night, the hum of ceiling fans as kindergarteners nap on colored pads. I have seen it in countless silent firefly explosions, and in the pulsing mirage I took for God when I first snorkeled through murky waters, but was only eye squiggles. And I have felt it when, wrapped in a cocoon of blankets, I have awoken groggy, not knowing where I am, freshly emerged from a womb. Time kneads itself, making my consciousness within the womb seem almost within reach – almost: at least more definite than yesterday’s commute.

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Two

I’ve always prided myself on straight cold rationality – the singlest answer, the simplest wisdom. But dreams recur like waves, pounding impressions into the gray shores of my mind: walking into a classroom unprepared; scrabbling against a maddened lioness; discovering in my home an extra room, a hidden wing; driving down to tropic shores, only to lose the first day to rain, the second and third to shopping, the fourth and fifth to friends, until it is the last day, it is the last hour, it is ten minutes before the long drive back to Maryland, and I have not slipped into the water with mask and fins even once. It is time to go, and I have not … Pressing the gas pedal, I cross bridges with the retreating, fading ocean in my rearview mirror, and I have not … I am not …

I am not returning to the ocean of my youth, not accomplishing what wants to be accomplished. Thirty-three: an age by which significant men bring forth significant work – an age by which Jesus accomplished the redemption of the world – and I am not … I have not …

Such waves bathe me, kneading, kneading, until I jolt awake into the linear, the strict tick of time toward daybreak, toward a commute and classes and bells and students and grades. At night I can replay, redo, at times even edit and direct – or, if not, do things differently when the dream recurs. But days plod on, oblivious, shoving each second before me like an opportunity only to yank it away – mechanical, predictable drill impeccable as death. Only sleep can uncurl my fingersome consciousness from the treads of time.

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Three

How peculiar, that awareness should be sustained by a web of neural cells liable to err and fail and die. A mere skull’s worth of fleshy grapefruit seems insufficient to bear the breadth and depth of consciousness, just as a beaded string of words cannot express the height and weight of human thought. They fail like film to encapsulate the full rounded O of nature, of experience – yet I persist in snapping photos, trying to bottle up impressions to carry home: pale shadows, looking through a thick glass darkly.

Stand on deck; peer out into the round black maw – no photo, no words can convey any true sense of it. Fling wide your arms to encompass it, millions of times larger than a man. Size yourself up against the dimension, the mass, the sheer nowhereness of it all. A thousand soundings would yield only a spectral chart of one square mile of sea, and only the sea floor at that – fathom upon fathom lurks between surface and floor: staggering mass of fluid emptiness, devoid of reference points.

I fill buildings with water – schools, offices, libraries, shopping malls, theaters – and survey them as a fish. From the ceiling I peer down through forty liquid feet at rows of soggy seats; I descend into the tighter lobby area, and into the still tighter space of a restroom, a closet. Water fills every cubic inch, and as I fin around I know that space, its shape, its mood, its character. I know the nature of my own house all too closely – cramped stairs, narrow windowless halls, rooms laid out in linear fashion, sandwiched between two townhomes. But by night my house has more rooms than I bought: a sub-basement, an attic bumpout, a backyard wing. These additions are familiar to me; they return over and over, along with other places – old schools I attended, reefs I snorkeled; a megacompilation of all the malls I’ve known; even strange continents, with peninsulas and isthmuses along glimmering ocean gulfs. The routes within my brain are grooved and worn; neurons fire along common paths, kneading spaces into one another until they recur like waves.

At times I pore through my mind’s stores, striving to recall any experience I have never yet recalled. It is a futile exercise, like trying to sense all of my body at once, every square inch of flesh, every joint and digit and extremity. I hunker down and concentrate: can I find one single nugget the waves have left unturned upon the gray shores of my consciousness – one single neuron cherishing a memory unrecalled? Impossible. Consciousness may seem a steady wash, but it is fragmented – the particulated product of specific cells that err, that fail, that lose themselves and die, delving up their treasures to the sea’s abyss.

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Four

Driving on the highway for an hour alone, I think.

If I jotted down my thoughts as they occurred, I would have a transcript: the contents of an hour’s thinking. Perhaps it is a slow one hundred thoughts, an average thirty-six seconds each – or perhaps it is a manic thousand, at a three-and-a-half-second pace. I could retrace that highway to determine where my car was at every minute, every second along the hour; just so, I could lay out which thoughts occurred at which points, calculating thoughts per mile, or thoughts per foot. I could print out the entire transcript using a typeface wide enough to stretch a banner along the shoulder, delineating the precise stream as it occurred. And then, the questions: am I satisfied with thinking that many thoughts? Could I have thought more – or were they enough?

Suppose an average of one unique thought for every waking second. Given a lifespan of eighty years, I can expect two and a half billion thoughts – a mind-numbing figure, to be sure. But is it enough? It’s less than the stars in the sky, than the population of the world – less even than Uncle Sam’s annual budget. Are two and a half billion thoughts enough?

Wear a tape recorder; capture the number of words spoken in a lifetime: far, far less than two and a half billion – at an estimated twelve thousand words per day, only a bit over three hundred million in total. Are they enough? How much fewer, the words written in a lifetime! This circuitous piece alone barely scrapes above two thousand – how many pieces like this can I write? How many words are necessary to encapsulate a life? Even a limitless quantity would still be strung point to point, in lines and sentences, flat black type on flat white paper. Could even two and a half billion printed words convey the dimension of a soul?

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Five

My words emerge begrudgingly, inch by slow inch, like yanking at a tape measure with the stop jammed down. I can’t extract enough to sound the fathoms between the floor and ceiling of my soul, nor can I expect anyone else to sense the depth behind the dipstick of my words.

I could relinquish. I could direct my two and a half billion thoughts instead toward others – still not enough for six billion human skulls. It is futile. They say that eyes are windows, but the real workings of the mind are veiled by skin and bone, communicated only through the thick dark glass of gestures and expressions and sounds.

I draw close to aquariums and peer into lidless windows, seeing if I can plumb even a simple mind – a grouping instinct, a desire for open spaces, a primal spark. In one pet store, one thousand consciousnesses – each distinctive, each with a will to live. Can beings so similar, so uniform, think unique thoughts? I have slowed myself to something near that consciousness, joining five fish beneath a nowhere reef in Cozumel, steadying myself as heedless waves and minutes passed, until I sensed that the vast sea bristled with life too broad to grasp as I hovered there, bathed in a billion water molecules, each molecule one unique thought out of all the organisms that have ever lived, will ever live. I have bathed in the wash of time, unable to contemplate at once even the water-thoughts that swathed the few square inches of my flesh, and I have sensed God romping through the depths. I have watched the sun set through liquid miles away, beside a spire of castle-kelp, and I have finned that densest emptiness, knowing that if only I swim far enough, I can make it. In the darkness I have felt the black surf pounding rocks, white foam fizzing before concussions blast like thunder into bone, a power immeasurably greater than myself, kneading a billion water molecules, and I have trembled … I have trembled. I have heard the hiss of a billion neurons pounding, churning against the gray shores of my mind as I have lain awake, restless, manic, hauled by seconds ticking until dawn, doubting the existence of death. I have known boredom – utter, abject boredom on all the planet’s quarters as I have stared at different ceilings in different countries among six billion different people. And I have found myself in nowhere places – a bush where I urinated in Uganda; a dismal dribbling waterfall in China; a sandy bar with crisscross waves in the Dry Tortugas; a lonesome narrow deck above a deep black sea – places that brought me low before my own small lostness. I felt it as a child, asleep, when night terrors haunted me with the whispered roar of grating sand, weightless pillows colliding like galaxies, and repeated tasks I failed without fail, opportunities lost like seconds.

Against the merciless ocean-tide of time, words are meaningless. The water molecules of my own few thoughts are but a puddle I could cup within two hands.

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Six

My mother taught me about puddles. At Shark’s Cove she showed me how to kneel down and watch: water contains life, she said, and if you pay close enough attention, you notice little nuggets – swimming, crawling, fluttering. Life was tough, resilient, myriad in all its forms, and every tidal pool contained a miracle. But it couldn’t be found simply by scanning enough places, like a word find or hide and seek – you had to relax, relinquish your focus, and absorb the whole pool, the entirety of its contents and dimension and movements. Only then would you find the vast microcosm’s life.

On a narrow deck at night, surrounded by the sprawling ocean’s darkness, I spread wide my arms and absorb. It is nowhere – a nameless point in a black and featureless sea – but it is the center of nowhere, and it is restful, inhaling and exhaling there, awash in the humid air. My round breaths echo the murmured sighs of an overnight Chinese train, small kindergarteners napping under ceiling fans. At this moment I am sitting in a lawn chair next door to a barking dog, transcribing thoughts into words arduously, inch by inch, but I am also on that overnight train, even now – and in that kindergarten, and on that deck, and with those five reef fish. I am in all of these places, and more, as time kneads my memories into a planetful of waves that churn a million miles of shore. New experiences are beginning to work themselves in (an unborn child freshly lost, a nightmare about lobotomy) – they will flavor all the rest, and more is yet to come, still to be kneaded in. There’s no way to capture it all on paper, no linear way to slog through it, no matter how much, how carefully I write. All that is left is to relinquish words, let go the pen, and bathe myself in the rounded sweep of life.

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Seven

Craggy rocks climb two hundred feet above a lava flow in the New Mexico desert. At the top: a hollow depression. The air is dry; perhaps it has not rained for weeks, but the depression has preserved a deep black puddle. Kneel down there, and absorb. Across the surface, along the bottom, against the sides squirm tiny tadpoles, wriggling, spirited. Their lively tails flex and flip, propelling them through the murk, stirring up ripples and churning the mud-gray shores in glorious, rounded revelry. It is a small pool, and temporary – but enough for them to bask in and enjoy.

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copyright © 2004, michael w. hobson