Seven-Tenths

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  These are all excuses, of course. The fact is, I am afraid of the place and so is everybody else. From the sunlit surface above its opening one can look across the road through the palms and see the church’s corrugated roof. If the fissure really does extend that far, it must be at least 100 metres long. Up in the brilliant daylight the whole legend looks different. The idea of a demon Kraken lying in its lair beneath a church is too naively Filipino, too redolent of Christian mythmaking to be more than the embroidery with which the credulous have ornamented a freak of local geology. Nevertheless, I am not going inside.

  Only a mile or two down the coast and not far out to sea the reefs drop suddenly into ultramarine depths. By swimming out over the shallow corals it is possible to pretend one is low flying, hedgehopping above rough coral terrain, an illusion strengthened by soaring out over this great abyss. So abrupt and powerful is the effect one may even feel one’s stomach drop. It was here, over the years, that I would practise seeing how far down I could swim, to set my own private record. Soon I knew every ledge on this cliff face, each downward step of the agonising but exhilarating journey. I knew each level by its peculiar feature – a coral outcrop or eccentric sponge – and also by its ambient light. I knew as well as Beebe where red became grey, where my blood looked dark green in the water. This series of terraces now seems a lunatic perpendicular via crucis, every step gained representing pain, but it also stands as a chill measure of ageing. I can no longer reach the very deepest of the shelves I once touched, raising a confirmatory plume of silt still visible from the surface like a triumphant smoke signal impressively far below. I might again, I tell myself, but only if I lost weight since fat is buoyant and means one has to burn up more oxygen to drag it all downwards. Since I can no longer measure my own record I have to estimate it as between 85 and 95 feet, rather less than the average local teenager can manage when harvesting big white sea cucumbers.

  It was here, perhaps to spite myself, I tried ‘riding the rock’ instead, or using a weight to pull me down. This is how no-limits free-diving records are set. Nobody labours to swim down; they ride the rock and when they let go they hope their still uncollapsed lungs contain enough air for them to claw their way back to the surface.* Taken to extremes it is a lethal sport, but I had no intention of going very deep. In the event, the whole business felt faintly embarrassing. There is something foolish about loading rocks into a dinghy, rowing out and jumping overboard clutching them to one’s chest. The first was too heavy and took me down so fast I could not ‘clear’ in time and the pain in my ears made me let go at about 30 feet. The next took me down rather languidly, and it was a pleasure to see ledges I had fought to reach drifting upwards past me like floors in a descending lift. With a subsequent rock I passed my own record and was pulled onwards into unknown territory. I do not believe I ever went further than about 160 feet. There was something disagreeably inexorable about the downward tug. It was not as if one doubted for a moment that one’s arms would release the weight before it was too late, but it had something to do with increasing pressure and deepening gloom which I had never experienced without breathing apparatus. Perhaps because the motion was entirely vertical and swift one imagined dissolving like a meteor, leaving a trial of silver bubbles, soon to be worn away to nothing by the rasping caress of the sea.

  Beebe had written, ‘The only other place comparable to these marvelous nether regions must surely be naked space itself … where sunlight has no grip upon the dust and rubbish of planetary air.’ The exploration of space and of the deep sea have obvious things in common. Both require venturers to be supplied with complex life-support systems and defended against extreme ambient pressure, whether positive or negative. At a mythic level, however, there are important differences, many of which – in the case of deeps – have to do with the dark.

  The famous and fatuous opposition of light and darkness is pre-Socratic in origin, only one pair of many made up of a ‘noble’ element (right, above, hot, male, dry, etc.) and an ‘ignoble’ (left, below, cold, female, wet). By the sixth and fifth centuries BC the faculty of vision and the attributes of knowledge had run together in the Greek word theorein, meaning both ‘to see’ and ‘to know’. Knowledge was henceforth a register of vision. Ignorance therefore becomes a lack of knowledge predicated on objects not being visible, so darkness equals ignorance. In turn, the dark becomes a source of fear as if a knowledge of visible objects were the only defence against terror and anxiety. By the eighteenth century the light of reason stood for the banishing of primordial fear: literally, enlightenment. Superstition as a concept is a product of eighteenth-century topology.* Where the ocean’s deeps are concerned several other dualities operate as well, such as up/down, lightness/pressure, outwards/inwards and future/past. To go into space is in some sense to go forwards; to go down into the depths is at a psychic level to regress.

  Why should this be? Space travel is ‘going forwards’ in the obvious sense that it involves technological ‘progress’, but so does deep sea exploration. It is as though Homo viewed himself in spatial rather than temporal terms, as if his history had been one not of eras and dynasties so much as of steady territorial expansion. Maybe the whole of human history might be rewritten, leaving out dates and measuring instead the boundaries pushed outwards by tribes on their way to becoming nations, by earthlings as they stake out their claims to colonise the solar system. Yet even with nations claiming EEZs and seabed rights it never feels an appropriate choice of cliché when journalists call the ocean depths ‘the last frontier’. As always, the sea is really less connected with space than with time, as if there were a correlation between going deep and going back. Thus the deeper one went the more primitive would be the life forms encountered, the more prehistoric and inchoate.

  This must be a comparatively recent idea, post-Darwinian, at any rate, and taking into account a popular version of Victorian scientists’ excitement on learning that the deeps were not azoic. The finding of the first coelacanth would have strengthened this, as does every fresh ‘sighting’ of the Loch Ness Monster. Legends of monsters and sea serpents are at least as ancient as the written word, but presumably it is only after the mid-nineteenth century that they begin to be depicted as prehistoric and corresponding loosely to fossil forms. The Loch Ness Monster is almost invariably spoken of nowadays not as some unknown species of sea snake or eel but as a saurian of prehistoric type. Since this is what people wish to be there, it is faithfully confirmed by all the ‘sightings’. It is thus a true remnant of a misapprehension by nineteenth-century science.

  Myths of space travel do include visits to worlds at an earlier stage of evolution than our own. Yet even these are often in ‘obscure’ backwaters of space, as if in the scriptwriters’ imaginations space corresponded to a vast ocean in which the most developed regions tended to be those appearing from Earth most brightly lit. (‘Rigel Concourse’ in Jack Vance’s stories is a good example, Rigel being a pure white, first-magnitude star. This is exactly where one would expect to find our outwardly bound pioneering descendants rather than huddled around some dismal cepheid variable out in the galactic sticks.) All this apart, the creatures most commonly associated with space operas as well as with UFOlogy are of an intelligence superior to ours, and with the waning of American paranoia about Communism they tend to be less and less bent on kidnapping and brainwashing. Nowadays space aliens may well incline towards the godlike, beings from whom we might acquire knowledge, enlightenment, light itself, before it is too late.

  The mythology of our own planet’s oceans is the polar reverse of all this, so much so that the nether world sometimes seems hardly part of the Earth at all. It is worth examining this from the popular standpoint for a moment because it shows how the concept of ‘the deeps’ relies on a jumble of associative ideas. Far from being likely to find enlightenment the further down we go, then, we expect to meet ever-dumber creatures. Moreover – exactly opposite to actuality – we envisage them near the bottom as sti
ll bigger, more terrifying in their mindless strength, and uglier … in fact, monsters. To this extent they are remarkably similar to the nightmare creatures of the unconscious: tentacular horrors which enwrap and bear their victims down and down to lairs where, in due time, begins the business of the hideous rending beak and saucerlike eyes. The very gradations of sleep itself seem to suggest a vertical descent into annihilating depths, the deepest levels of sleep being those of oblivion. The levels of dreaming, like the layers of the ocean which can support the biggest life forms, lie nearer the surface. In any case, by descending into the sea we would expect to meet the monstrous rather than the divine. Gods are the last things we would imagine finding in the deeps. It is no accident that even the men we encounter tend to be people like Captain Nemo, ominous whichever way we read his name. Astronauts have claimed close encounters with a Supreme Being, but never deep sea divers. Nor should we be surprised. Superior beings are by definition on top, while only the inferior can lurk below. The deeps also remind us of where we suppose we originally came from, what we have left behind. Going back thus to our genetic roots rather than to the sunlit idyll of Eden is a disquieting affair. Did we not abandon our ancestral dark by crawling towards the light?

  No; we did not. The sea, to its dwellers, is not a dark place. With exceedingly acute eyes perceiving low levels of light and complex codes of bioluminescence; with sensitivity to sounds, smells and minute pressure differentials far beyond the spectrum of our own senses, it is as pointless to speak in crude human terms of ‘light’ and ‘dark’ as it would be when speculating about what a bat sees. A bat ‘sees’ with its ears with great precision and at speed. In short, there is no such thing as darkness. It exists only in the perception of the beholder. Vision, like understanding, does not depend on light.

  To these ‘oppositions’ and their associations (up/down, above/below, superior/inferior, heaven/hell) should be added striving/sinking, where the first generally implies upward aspiration and self-betterment and the second is redolent of slummocking on a downward path, of Jack finding his own level while still undrowned. ‘Sinking’ is also used to describe wretched people glistening with sickness on their deathbeds, as if their problem were only one of weakness and they could no longer resist the force of gravity tugging them down towards their graves. That there might be something subtler at work than these pairs of opposites is suggested by the Latin word altus which can mean both high and deep (as it does still in Italian and where l’alto means ‘the Deep’ in an oceanic sense which also lingers in the English phrase ‘the high seas’). In the Freudian unconscious, at least, such an idea would not embody a contradiction because there are no contradictions in the unconscious. Entirely antithetical and mutually cancelling propositions can exist simultaneously with not the slightest difficulty.

  Perhaps, then, the least strange thing about the Deep is the degree to which it has retained its psychic force, its sonorous and chilling stateliness, its amalgamation of height and depth, of gulfs of space and of time. Almost no matter what is done to the oceans, however much they are explored and exploited, even ravaged and polluted, the Deep surprises us by its resistance to contamination. In this respect its resembles the Moon, which still feels much the same even though we know its dust bears the frivolous prints of cleated boots playing golf. The fact is, it was a different moon on which the astronauts landed, just as it is a different deep which GLORIA deafens with its sonar signals and whose silt is scarred by remotely controlled sleds gathering the sort of things a sled would gather. Neither Beebe nor Piccard nor Ballard ever visited the Deep. They reached various depths, even the ocean bed, but they carried the Deep within them. It is not a space to which there is physical access. Yet an air of mystery, no matter how slight, still surrounds objects retrieved from the depths, even beer bottles and polystyrene cups lowered by the curious. People like to touch things brought up, such as hoppers full of nodules. They like to feel the chill of aeons before it fades, just as they like to handle meteorites and moon rocks. If the ocean vanished tomorrow its mystery would not be found in the sum of its creatures flopping and dying and rotting on its bed. It exists elsewhere altogether, as Tennyson well knew when he capitalised on its high melancholy to express his grief over Arthur Hallam’s death, hidden and heightened in a transition: ‘From the great deep to the great deep he goes.’*

  * No-limits apnea uses a weighted sled rather than a rock for descent, and an air bag for ascent. The current record is held by the Belgian, Patrick Musimu, who in 2005 was pulled down to 209 metres (686 feet) in the Red Sea and survived.

  * This passage originates in a lecture given by Mark Cousins at the Architectural Association in London on 23 November 1990.

  * Tennyson, Idylls of the King, ‘The Coming of Arthur’, 1.140.

  III

  MARGINALIA

  Dating the Earth

  William Buckland’s Bridgewater Treatise maintained that the presence of fossils embedded in sedimentary rocks was definitive proof of Noah’s Flood. This work, really a series of lectures, was published in the 1830s, the same decade as Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, whose radical conclusions could scarcely have been more different. By Buckland’s day the question of the Earth’s age was keenly debated. The natural sciences had evolved to the point where a more serious answer was needed than Mosaic chronology could provide. The supremacy of the biblical version of Earth’s creation had already been challenged a century earlier by Newtonians like the Comte de Buffon. Eighteenth-century science had gained enough insight into geological processes to enable it not so much to speculate about how old the Earth was but to wonder how all the vast, slow procedures of erosion and sedimentation and the laying down of fossil beds could have been squeezed into the mere 6,000 or so years allowed by Scripture.

  It is possible to argue that until Christianity there was no such thing as time. That is, until after the life of Christ, people’s notion of time would have been largely cyclical, based on the regular recurrence of seasonal and astronomical phenomena. Longer periods were simultaneously precise and vague, being measured by carefully preserved familial dynasties such as the lengthy genealogies in the Old Testament. To small rural societies, the Earth was unchanging, as old as legend, as old as their creation myths. It was not possible to apply any external timescale to it because one did not exist. This view of time changed radically with the coming of Christianity. Suddenly, time stopped being a slow, circular continuity and became an ‘arrow’, linear, flowing in a single direction from Creation to the Last Judgement. Christ had come as a man in fulfilment of a prophecy, and as a man he had died. He could only do so once, so his life was just an episode – though a momentous one – in a single temporal trajectory which was carrying all mankind with it towards the great Millennium.

  Once this idea had taken root, theologians began examining the Judaic scriptures with new motives. They were now less interested in the genealogies as evidence of pedigree than as ways of calculating how many years had elapsed since God had created the world so lately visited by his son. Theophilus of Antioch put Creation at 5529 BC; Julius Africanus at 5500 BC. This was eventually reduced by Martin Luther to 4000 BC and finally Archbishop Ussher produced a date of scholarly precision, 4004 BC, which stood as the problem’s definitive solution. This date gained such wide acceptance it was printed in most English bibles with chronologies. It can be found even today in some fundamentalist bibles.

  This firm date of 4004 BC had all sorts of consequences for the way in which people thought and looked at the world and soon produced intolerable strains in the burgeoning natural sciences. Even archaeologists began worrying about how societies as complex as that of ancient Egypt could have evolved so quickly. To some it was clear that the oldest pyramids dated from around 3000 BC, only a scant thousand years after the beginning of the World According to Archbishop Ussher. Geology, meanwhile, had progressed to where the publication of Lyell’s Principles of Geology in 1833 made it clear it was no longer ne
cessary to invoke six-day acts of creation or great-flood catastrophism in order to explain the Earth’s structures. All that were needed were the ordinary processes which anyone could observe, plus almost unlimited quantities of time. Once it was assumed that fossil beds could be millions of years old instead of a maximum of 6,000 it created a sort of conceptual breathing space in which many things suddenly began to make sense.

  No matter how horrible or absurd their positions may be, there is always an element of poignancy about diehards. It was therefore both comic and pitiful to see a scientist like Philip Gosse confront evidence such as Lyell’s and be unable to relinquish his own fundamentalist position. Instead, he went into contortions which effectively destroyed him, bringing down on his fervent and well-meaning head the ridicule even of churchmen. In 1857, only six years after his school zoology textbook, he published Omphalos which, as the title implies, had as its centre of gravity the question of the navel. Adam must have had a navel because God had created him as the genotype of the human race. Since Adam had no mother, his navel was surely more exemplary than functional. Similarly, had Adam cut down one of the trees in the Garden of Eden he would have found annual growth rings, although they had been there only days. To deal with this problem Gosse claimed that some things were ‘prochronic’ or ‘pre’-Time. Adam’s navel and the tree rings were prochronic. Because the first chicken had been created fully fledged, the putative egg from which it hadn’t in fact hatched was equally prochronic. So also were fossils. God, for reasons best known to himself, must deliberately have ‘salted’ the Earth with fossils in order to make it seem older, perhaps, and maybe even to test the faith of later scientists, especially geologists.