Chapter 2 of Cetaceans and Ships; Or, the Moorings of Our Being
Chapter 2 Of Cetaceans and Ships; or, The Moorings of Our Being “L’imagination . se lassera plutôt de concevoir que la nature de fournir.” (Te imagination runs dry sooner than nature does.) —Pascal, Pensées Is the Sea a Medium? To understand media, we should start not on land but at sea. Te sea has long seemed the place par excellence where history ends and the wild be- gins: the abyss, a vast deep and dark mystery, unrecorded, unknown, un- mapped. Melville called the sea “Inviolate Nature primeval.” It has long been a profoundly unnatural environment for humans in both life and in thought. Seventy- one percent of the earth’s surface has been a sub- lime, uncanny place without limits and beyond understanding, the ulti- mate wasteland. Te ocean was once roiling with dragons, Leviathans, and pirates— a merciless mix of fate, wind, and weather that imperiled anyone brave or foolish enough to risk their life on ship. It is still a very dangerous place, a kind of planetary waste dump and graveyard for many forms of life, including hapless immigrants. Only recently have humans dipped much below its surface, with depth exploration historically having been limited to the shoreline. Both Babylonian and Hebrew ori- gin myths describe creation as the conquest of chaotic uncreated waters (tiamat, tehom). Te Book of Revelation, at the opposite end of the Bible from Genesis, seals this conquest by announcing a new heaven and earth 53 54 CHAPTER TWO in which the sea is no more, abolished as if in a fnal act of spite (Revela- tions 21:1).
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