Tuesday 111: God's foot

The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.

-Herman Melville, Moby Dick

The doomed voyage of the submersible Titan is the sort of news story that comes pre-packaged for critical analysis. The vessel itself is a convenient symbol of contemporary hubris, crushed instantly and indifferently by unfathomable pressures (literal). Its crew and passengers are ripe for the picking too: Billionaire tourists with an interest more pedestrian than perverse in a 100-year-old shipwreck; egotistical, self-proclaimed innovators with a bewildering disregard for both industry standards and the laws of physics; modern adventurers adrift in a sea of meaninglessness; and of course the parts of all these people which were human. There was (basically) a child on board.

Whatever disparate preoccupations brought these people to this place, death has now superseded. The narrative as it extends from who these people were to the world extends now from that moment of death, and the particulars of their lives are selected, emphasized, framed within the way they perished: their enormous wealth and how they got it, their foibles and cocksure sound bytes, their privleged lives. It’s easy to look at these people and see a human subject derived entirely from the excesses of capital, raging against its own mortality. These are the kind of men (it’s not alwaysd men, but it’s usually men) who say aging is a disease and that there’s a cure for death. Death is something to be overcome, because there is nothing else to overcome, and the point of living is to overcome things.

When all this happened though, I mostly thought about the sea, about Pip, the cabin boy in Moby Dick who “goes mad” because he sees the truth about the world in the endless abyss of the deep. The complexity of this madness leaves us to consider both the cost and grace of truth, the cruelty and beauty of the natural world’s indifference.

The captain-CEO of the doomed submersible once said he wanted to change the way people thought about the deep ocean. I have no reason to doubt his ambitions as a diving enthusiast, but I read passages like the one at the top of this post and wonder just what he wanted to change, or what he believed he could add. Anyone who has ever stood before, splashed in, or floated upon an ocean has no doubt come to a primal understanding of our relationship to it. Virgil’s Aeneid opens with a description of Aeneas’ journey from Troy to Italy, one commanded by destiny, on which he is “buffeted by waves,” or “hurled between land and shore at the will of the Gods.” The notion that the sea is not something to be conquored, controlled, or even understood, but only glimpsed, is ancient. Whatever happens to Aeneas subsequently, he is adrift when the Aeneid opens. He has no control.

The desire—manifested through some absurd engagement of perceived domination—to exert psychic control over the ocean, is a rejection of the truths to which Aeneas is subjected, and which drive Pip mad with wisdom upon their revelation. It could be almost be considered a test of intention, of humanity, to stare into the faceless void and accept the indifference, the fact that even in your act of definace, you have defied nothing, conquered nothing, not even survived, but merely continued to exist.

That the submersible fiasco kept me up at night for awhile didn’t surprise me, but I wonder just what it was that bothered me about it: the terror of mortality’s awful truths, or our rampant rejection of them.

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