Breadcrumb #565
EMILY BILMAN
When I make my first steps into
the wide sea and a swarm of juvenile
gilt-breams swirl around my legs,
I linger on the brink of the beryl-beach
like an infatuated maiden moon,
my feet submerged in salt-water
as I sense the soft skins of the breams
and rejoice in their silver transparencies –
Suddenly as I swim, I feel
frightened by my own shadow
beneath me as if it were the shadow
of a wild thief possessing me
or the unknown shadows of multitudes
threatening my communion
with the nurturing salt-water
that did bear me as a child.
The gilt-breams still slide
on the diaphanous waters,
their lithe dorsal fins bent down
like folded sails while I dive
head-down into the salt-water,
blessing each mineral ion oozing
into my skin, carrying me into
the depths, rendering me weightless.
While I swim back towards the shore
the gilt-breams slither along the breaths
of the soft sands, their spines, secretly
clasping their silver-shaded lamella
blending in their own transparencies,
with their crimson phosphorescent
gills, pumping mineral oxygen
like a marine heart bitter to the taste.
*****
Juvenile fish always swim between my feet when I enter the seas of my childhood. I feel so very weightless when I float in the water. Swarms of juvenile bass or juvenile pike follow me into the blue-green sea as I walk through the dunes. They stretch for miles into the expanse like sea-breasts spreading plankton to nurture the fish and the currents and replenish the earth’s atmosphere with oxygen. When I swim, I defy gravity: in modes of crawl, backstroke or butterfly, I feel heft-free. I recall the softness of the juvenile fish-skins rubbing against mine and still cherish the sensation in my effective adult memory.
Like me in sea-water, astronauts defy gravity. But in zero gravity, their senses are blunted. They appreciate extremely spicy food to compensate for the dulling of their taste. They say that they even feel their vital organs floating inside their bodies when they move inside the shuttle, as if their organs were toy glass-marbles with which they played as children. Astronauts are constantly jet-lagged. Zero gravity also challenges their circadian rhythms of wake and sleep that get distorted, like the wayward clocks that Salvador Dali painted in The Persistence of Memory.
As they look down at our spinning world, days become extended into mostly fifteen dawns surprising them like myriad suns rising through their shuttle windows. That’s how surprised I feel when wave is borne into wave with the sea wind and waves bear my half-swimming body to the safety of the shore. Then, as now, silver-finned fish swim around me with their diaphanous specter-like silhouettes and I feel refreshed. I have seen pictures of astronauts drifting around the space shuttle crawling into themselves like fetuses floating in the maternal womb. As archaic as primal sea creatures might seem to us, these pictures remind me of the snail fish slowly swimming in the freezing depths of the Mariana Trench.
Fascinated by life in space and under the seas ever since I remember, as a young girl, reading, Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, I imagine men colonizing the sea-depths with cities built with impermeable nano-materials made of cellulose or vinyl or soft hybrid eco-leather to keep us safe in a subterranean environment. We would probably use the cellulose-covered plants as a model for the invention of such hermetic materials. We would move in and around the cities in water-proof cars and water-proof motorcycles. Our houses would be connected, each to each, by bridges and corridors, allowing us to move between them. We would communicate with each other through impermeable electronic devices. Our food would be delivered from the shore and we would keep a lot of stocks in refrigerators.
“We wage war because we do not assimilate our proper shadows”
Robots would help deliver merchandise from the land as they would help with daily tasks. Our clothes would have to be made of vinyl-like materials that envelop woolen or cotton underclothes to keep us dry under water continually. Like the astronauts, we would drink fruit juices and consume smoothies bursting with vitamins. Above all, we would have to be extremely thrifty in our usage of water because it would have to be desalinated from sea-water and be transferred to our homes through water-tunnels made of stainless steel and other expensive non-corrosive metals. Like the astronauts, we would probably have to use ventilators and scrubbers to purify the air to enable us to breathe.
I was surprised like a young astronaut seeing the world spin for the very first time, when the phone rang, and friends invited me to see an episode of Star Wars. I forsake my imagination to accept the invitation. After the movie, I wondered whether we would, indeed, fight to maintain our humanity in the quilted wild world of space exploration. It seemed odd that so much effort spent by human courage, mechanical precision, and recycled order that made space missions successful would be wasted on fighting star wars.
But, then again, our pioneering and territorial needs, coupled with the competitiveness of space discovery, would turn space wars into an inevitable reality, whose only consolation would be to remain as humanly courageous and compassionate as possible. Yet, the hostility of the environment would unite us around our common humanity. As astronauts who use their daily food thriftily to survive in their shuttle, we would have to use our resources economically to survive in a hostile environment as barren as a waterless desert.