Waiting For Hammerheads
Galapagos: People transformed underwater.
Eight of us descended ninety feet, hugging the submerged volcanic cliff that now soared up behind us. Though weaponless, our ambitions were primordial-Pleistocene. Anticipating immense ragged-toothed beasts, we hunkered behind boulders, peeked out to scan clearwater-bluewater vastness. The raspy report of bottle-breathing, the pulsating gurgle of skyflighting bubblestreams placed me amongst expectant ones.
We waited together — weightless, fluid-motionless — and breathed.
Sharks swim like sharks and nobody else, an unhurried, metronomic pace. Muscular torsos propel steady threshing: broad-swath slicing through fluid, an unforgettable silhouette.
Sharkfin threshing compels softskinned mammalian attention. But it’s not that sharks are uniformly ominous-dangerous; some are sleek and sporty while others are wriggly-puppydog cute. They all thresh.
Threshing-slicing through water announces that I am a shark and I am truly suspended-in, travelling-through watery time. More precisely, sharks are an ancient, pre-dinosaurian bodyplan, a success that persists. Each shark is a time traveler, a well-muscled and leathery invader of a much younger now, the one we now inhabit.
So we rested among boulders, a raspy-gurgling wait, on alert for the motion of threshing. We watched: the white-sandy bottom a limitless plain, immersed in and covered by vitreous bluewater sphere.
Divers in-waiting sip deliberate deepbreaths and slowly exhale. The rhythm of bluewater breathing — in deeply, out slowly, — is meditation, hypnotic-descending and deeper, into wateryworld. Eyes-open, I absorbed a spectrum unfathomed, vivid-vista of tropical blue.
Viewed from above, vivid brilliant-blue is the color of tropical ocean. Through the glassy lens of a starboard-tack porthole, midwater ocean at surface appears in blue of an ice-minty candy. We travelled by wind as I watched.
Years earlier — becalmed in a schooner, seeking refuge from scorching tropical sun — I kersplashed into Atlantic Sargasso seawater. Suspended above miles of tropical clearwater ocean, — floating limply, with snorkel and mask — I witnessed the water, looking expectantly down. Knowing something of oceans and the clearwater barrens of mid-ocean gyres, I expected nothing.
I was mistaken: brilliant-blue surprised and then ravished, entered into me. I winced as I stared at the patterning brightness: whirlings of light, among downward-piercing, sparkling shards of convergent tropical sunshine. Peering into oceanic sapphire, I wondered about the lightstreams, shattering darkness and downward toward frigid seabottom-blackness and mud.
Widely on Earth, solar brightlight penetrates tropical bluewater ocean, to ignite transformation. The sunlit layer of sea is only veneering; it is here that companionstar’s blazing catalyzes salt water, to construct, energize and perpetuate the process and substance of Living.
While floating I understood — stood-under the knowing — that a star is the flame igniting biology. A mindheart encompassed the matrix of living, immersed within watery blue. Peering downward into Atlantic bluewater vastness, a hue and its chroma entered me, inoculated itself into me. Everything changed: I was different, and forever. I floated on ocean and watched very deeply, finding an ocean of deepwater time.
For a deeply submerged diver, hidden while watching and waiting for threshing, horizontal brilliant blue is like that. However panoramic blue, extends outward, not downward — into seeming infinity-space. Yet here too the immersion and infection with blue is literal.
I can’t get that blue out of my mind. Nor do I want to.
How can I craft into words these visions of bluesea, of resonant-infinite spacetime?
Counterfeit bluesea resembles the chromatic bluescreen in every TV news studio. The tailored-attractive meteorologist stands in front of that blue, points at studio bluewall and watches themselves on a monitor; we all view projection of continents, clouds, oceans (and lines of interpretation). From bluescreen projection, we watch and interpret words and their gestures.
The baldheaded faces of BlueManGroup employs the verysame blue. Press power to on, and monochrome technoblue announces, “Your DVD player is conversing with your television (or digital projector); back and forth, we are talking and listening, trying to figure things out”. If monochrome technoblue changes to warning-in-writing, it means they have done so.
However, technoblue only mimics — is a garish counterfeit of — bluewater-infinite; it is void of depth-texture dimension. Monochrome technoblue is bangjolts the senses, neither enters nor innoculates, lacks silky immersion.
There is no invitation in technoblue.
Bluewater invitation persists. After days of bottle breathing — finning about and drifting on fastwater currents, then waiting for hammerheads — we hauled anchor, turned from islandside cliffs, twin-dieseled towards Galapagos airport and home. A dinnertime feasting on exhilaration and fishrice sent me early to bed. Awakening early, I stepped onto the fantail deck of our strong steely ship. There I encountered blackwater rolling of deepnight-deepwater ocean, the rhythmic rippling rhythm of salty tropical moonlight.
Only the thrumming of motors and a serenity-whooshing of propellered waterwake was there, at the edge of darkwater Pacific vastness. Another compression of senses and spacetime occurred. In a trance like hypnosis, a singularity moment descended.
Watching the ocean so close beneath me; above blackwater solitude-ending I poised.
Invitation slipped in and away; then again. Neither a deathwish nor moment of madness-despairing, it was the memory-silky of brilliantly blue that called me to enter the blackness. I shivered the impulse, yet stayed a long moment, felt it calling — still stronger — again….
Stepping back from the rail, I decisively fled towards my bunk. Determined yet still pausing twice — sea under Moon, unity longing — I listened and watched for a moment-extended, then turned and headed below.
A similar pull accompanied nearness of the great Niagara Falls. Here at the brink, there was nothing despairing, escape neither suggested nor sought. Yet the watery-wooing was here, neither salty nor blue.
The viscous thickness of water at cliffedge, a sticky-plasma of jelly that slides…. greenwater hurtling over and down. The sounds of crashing and foaming…. the green like a tincture distilled out from emeralds, with streaks of white alongside deeper vitreous jade. Such was my coolwater calling.
Into the union of wonder-full water — out-from freshwater-it, into saltwater-me — the calling was given and felt. From Like unto like, from Deep unto deep, it was either an echo or a deliberate calling.
I cannot solve the riddle.
Yet I persist in looking and longing for water. I enter my role and pause to remind you of evidence, of tropical bluewater everywhere, those saltwater seas in you and in me.
Saltwater seas arose in the cosmos, in plasmatic fires and a Greatstar’s explosive shattering. The results of a BIGbang brought hydrogen, the Greatstar brought oxygen; the convergent congealing of Her deathparts formed Sun, moons and planets. But first was a solarwind sorting, in circles of gravity-time.
The process is found in rockchunks falling from space — one is resting on table beside me. The consequences are archived in the macros and micros of Living saltwater seas.
Smell along seashore-remember. Ocean is moisture and musk of passionate dampness, fluids and products of birthing and dying. The seas a-rolling, fertility’s gliding. The scent of a seashore is living-and-dying entanglement. There is no denying, the symbols seeming deliberate: the everywhere salt of such coupling is living and loving as is.
Sea is the taste of wombwater, the depths of a woman, saltwater semen and plasma. Blood is an animaled sea, an infilling of critters, a living consortium. Ocean primeval tips her hand — the ancient of days — in saltiness-sweat, in the heartbreak and joy-into-falling of tears. Explore every leaf, look at thinslice with a technical lens: the gel in each cell is a sea, ancient light-eating bacteria, suspended inside a watery, symbio-world. Neither system nor network, Living is nesting of organelle-into-cell (and so-on), ever-concentric jellied compartments of ancient saltwater seas.
All of it calls and remembers?
Returning deeply below, we bottlebreathed-waited, as oceans within oceans silently swirled….. a physiological flowing of loops within loops — as we waited for hammerheads.
As I write I listen for callings of tropical infinite blue. Longing to feelhear it, words continue to fail. I cannot rightly tell it. Perhaps someone else can explain?
When humankind visited Moon, they descended in pairs, remaining awhile. A third explorer — the Command Module pilot — remained aboard mothership, viewing higher perspective.
Photos and narrative record their orbiting passages. Circling over and over their companions below, a shattered-rock spectrum — craggy grays and powdery rockdust — was breathlessly titled: magnificent desolation. On the lunar darkside — sheltered from sunlight and Earthtech radio chatter — the pilot-alone was immersed in the deepest literal solitude that had ever been experienced by a human being.
Apollo solonauts were encased in a fragile technobubble of metal and primitive plastic; their bodies were separated from — not immersed in — incomprehensible vastness. They peered into blackness-infinity starfires through bulletproof windows.
Yet the experience impacted these men, alongside those who reflected as they metaphorically thought-watched. I have read only a little; perhaps I will examine more deeply, to find and discover more. Yet I know they have written and spoken of smallness and vastness, of solitude-unity, of being immersed into something, something like membership.
Brilliant tropical blue — waiting for hammerheads — echoes like that.
Kurt Andrew Grimm — August 2015 — Vancouver, Earth
Waiting For Hammerheads is a kaleidoscopic narrative linking foundational science with unique conceptual synthesis, evolving within and arising out from a well-travelled Earth sciences professor with a mystic’s experience, to reflect while reflecting upon, material and metaphysical worlds.
