The Living Ocean

"Carp"
4.6 x 7.1 inches
etching
FOR SALE







I’ve always been fascinated by the thought that there are worlds out there that we humans don’t participate in. There’s the air, the domain of the birds, the deep woods, where all sorts of animals privately live out their lives, there’s the microscopic world and the world of radio waves, but the one that I find most intriguing is water. It is the shroud of the medium makes that world so evasive.

When you go to the shore and you look out at that vast body of water before you, you speak of it in its collective term, “ocean” because that’s all you see, that large reflective surface that goes on seemingly forever. “Ocean” is a collective term, because there is so much below it. On the shore the refuse of shells, crab carcasses, starfish and seaweed spewed out by the surf; slivers, remnants and signs of what hides beneath.

A parasitology lecturer at university once made the invisible world concrete. “The eelworm, a tiny nematode”, she explained, “is so numerous, ubiquitous, in fact, that if we were to remove all physical objects from the world except the eelworms, their shapes would remain visible”. Writhing, squirming eelworm ghosts. That’s how I try to imagine the ocean, drained of all its water, its inhabitants in place.

Picture the whales hovering like zeppelins kilometers above the sludgy ocean floor, where sickly, light-deprived monsters and living dust prey and are preyed on. Tuna flash like race-car drivers between schools of silver herring. Reefs form humps and bumps nearer shorelines. Stingrays like kites overhead and jellyfish like Mary Poppins’ umbrella; jungles of seaweed coming from the ocean floor. It would be a teeming, moving scene full of life, life that is reflected and hidden by the surface of the water.

Maybe it’s because of this fascination that I had a goldfish in my first university year. It taught me how foreign the world of water is to me. The goldfish did not live long; after a week in my care it turned upside-down, paddled around a bit, and in trying to get it right-side-up again, I changed its water once, then twice and even three times a day, thinking perhaps I had gotten a bowl too small and that its own waste water was making it ill. The fish died after a few short weeks.

How could I have known that the secret to its life lay not in the water but in the air? The mouth of the bowl was too small, the fish drowned in the very thing it needed most and through the absence the one thing it could not live in. I still feel guilty to this day thinking that I had caused it to suffer.

That was the end of my goldfish-keeping days.

At lunchtime I sometimes go to the nearest body of water to think about the life in it. There’s a pond in the nearby botanical gardens with a school of over-sized and lazy Koi carp in it. They drift to the sides of the pond when they notice a human presence, and especially when the shadow of a bird overhead passes over their water, I am aware of their world and ours.

A quick sketch turned into an etching.