The Glory Inside the Gutter

Dark, provocative, light, collective and submerged magic have all made appearances this past week.  All of it is important.  I will spare you the yankings of one-cannot-exist-without-the-other narratives.  I don't, entirely, believe them.  But the interlacing of them all is something I can believe in.  Or, at least, something I can understand.

I've been connecting, again, to the parts of myself that I hide the most and celebrating them.

I've been connecting, again, to the parts of myself that exist within other people. Those I know, those I don't know, and those I'm not entirely sure if I know. 

I've been reading Antonin Artaud and Jacques-Yves Cousteau. It has been feeding me splendidly and fully.

[I'm smiling, here, imagining the two having written a collaborative piece of literature.  A heady theater piece written while in a submarine, or perhaps a critique written by aligning rocks to read as text on the bottom of the sea.  Perhaps Artaud was a silent third tag along to test the first aqua lungs with Cousteau - at ages 47 and 33, respectively.

The Theater and Its Double was written, in its original form anyway, in 1938. The Silent World was written in 1953.

It could have happened.

Those texts on the bottom of the sea.

Only the rocks and kicks of sand in the depths of endless mystery know for sure.]

I wrote a letter to a person who matters to me this afternoon.

I included with it, this paragraph from Cousteau's The Silent World.

There is something of it that encompasses everything as of late, and so I will leave it here, with you, as well:

Attentive ears may occasionally perceive a remote creaking sound, especially if the breath is held for a moment.  The hydrophone can, of course, swell this faint sound to a din, helpful for analysis, but not the way it sounds to the submerged ear.  We have not been able to adduce a theory to explain the creaking sounds.  Syrian fishermen select fishing grounds by putting their heads down into their boats to the focal point of the sound shell that is formed by the hull.  Where they hear creaking sounds they cast nets.  They believe that the sound somehow emanates from rocks below, and rocks mean fish pasturage.  Some marine biologists suppose the creaking sound comes from thick thousands of tiny shrimps, scraping pincers in concert.  Such a shrimp in a specimen jar will transmit audible snaps.  But the Syrians net fish, not shrimps.  When we have dived into creaking areas we have never found a single shrimp.  The distant rustle seems stronger in calm seas after a storm, but this is not always the case.  The more we experience the sea, the less certain we are of conclusions.




be well; be loved; be absolutely alive.

k.