The soundtrack to this post is I Follow Rivers by Lykke Li.
Here is something about following an underground river, an invisible thread, rather than a front-of-the-mind objective, quiet observation and subtle clues, living inside the creative not-knowing. The sub/conscious.
My interest in sea life wasn’t always in the front of my mind, but over the years I have found small drawings and texts in my notebooks. And collected shells and sand dollars and lined them up on the windowsills of various apartments. Cowrie shells were currency.
I loved the film Rust and Bone (dir. Jacques Audiard) about a woman who works with killer whales then has a hot affair with a boxer. Also Le Grand Bleu (dir. Luc Besson) about free divers, dolphins, people suspended between worlds.
France has called 2024-2025 the Year of the Ocean to create awareness of its biodiversity, fragility and necessity to human life. I learned about this because I went walking.
On Thursday I woke up more obsessed than usual with the sea, and went for a walk, and ended up at le 104 , an art institute, where there is an exhibition of artworks made by artists and artist-researchers while on board the Tara, a research ship founded by agnès b. and her family. The artists went on research trips on the schooner and made work that is on display at the 104 now.
On Friday I went to the Aquarium with my notebook to look at the corals (and the jellyfish).
Some corals are bioluminescent!
In which I geek out about corals for the next few pages:
Coral bleaching happens when sea levels rise and this causes the coral polyps to expel the zooxanthellae. Zooxanthellae are photosynthetic algae cells, converting sunlight into food for the polyps; they also give the coral its color (or bioluminescence!). (Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (noaa.gov) (but likely not for long since Musk, an unelected unofficial and his team of barely out of college engineers are now controlling the US Treasury payment system!))
It is said that 80% of the ocean is “unexplored” or “unknown”, meaning unseen by humans, no searchlights flashed inside a cave of _______ [an as-yet-unknown fangtooth], no one bush-whacked into the living room of _________ [an as-yet-undiscovered creature].
The unknown has often been written as scary. At the ends of old medieval maps, vast swathes were marked Terra Incognita. Here be lions, cartographers wrote on the edges of their maps, with drawings of fantasy beasts and serpents. The unknown areas were shown as fearful and strange.
I have always walked through the unknown, without a map, with few guideposts, and I felt fear sometimes (ok, a lot) but I felt I was following an invisible thread. I don’t know what that thread is, is it my intuition, guidance from different realms, an abiding curiosity, or the future pulling me forward?
I spent years telling myself I couldn’t draw or didn’t know how to draw but this longing for drawing never left me. I wrote, I took pictures, I couldn’t draw. Yet I’d find tiny drawings in my notebooks and journals. I still don’t know how to draw, but I sit with my notebook and I follow a small quiet indication and something happens.
Here is Lydia Yuknavitch on Cheryl Strayed’s Dear Sugar:
Tell us your best advice.
When afraid, become a new story. Become a new creature. Conjure the new myths, new shapes, new voices and bodies. There may be journeys, but not just journeys. There may be carryings, transitions, silences, liminal spaces, circles, repetitions, returns, figures of being and becoming more profoundly powerful than achieving actions and knowing.
Carryings…silences…returns…figures and ways of being and becoming more powerful than knowing.
The future is unwritten.
My heart is open to your words! Always.
Appreciate you & am really getting into this platform as an alternative to the chaotic, dopamine draining others. Love you <3